Page 2: Damon Albarn's 13 Studio

Toys For The Boys

Although 13 is by no means a large space, there's no such thing as a quick tour, simply because of the sheer quantity of equipment in it. Pride of place, at the moment, goes to a severely tacky‑looking brown plastic organ with an odd selection of buttons. "Have you ever heard of an Optigan?" enquires Jason. Pressing a key elicits a sound like a cross between a harmonium and a dying seal, which seems like the sound any beaten‑up toy organ might produce until Jason fishes an odd‑looking LP‑sized clear plastic disc from its electronic intestines. "It's an optical record," he explains. "The waves are actually drawn on a see‑through record, and the machine has an eye which actually reads the waves, and that's how it creates the sound. If I hold it up to the light, you can actually see the sounds!"

The Optigan, with one of its optical discs.

While the Optigan's keyboard produces wheezing organ tones — each track on the disc has the same organ tone at a different pitch — the buttons to the left of it are used to play the backing tracks which make up the rest of the record. "Every track is the same loop in a different key," explains Jason. "It was originally made as a kid's toy, to learn music on, and this German band went in to a studio and recorded 150 tunes in every key — not just once, but in every single key, so you've got that one loop in every key. Imagine, a German band just sitting there for ages doing the same loop in every single key. You've got your drums and your keys, and then you've got an organ to play over the top. And it was all made as a toy!"

"There are also different percussion loops you can turn on and off," adds Tom.

"You can imagine the cult following behind all of this," continues Jason. "There's a massive Internet site for it [www.optigan.com, home of (amongst much else) the downloadable 'virtual optigan', a Java‑based simulation of the instrument], and someone's found the original multitracks that all the records were made out of, in Germany, and they're just trying to find a company to actually start making them again."

"Apparently it's quite rare these days to have one with this number of records," explains Tom, swapping Pop Piano Plus Guitar for the marvellous Big Top Marching Band with its snare‑drum rolls, oompah brass, piccolo trills and recorded applause.

"As soon as you hear that, you think 'God, we don't even need to do anything else — let's just release that!'" exclaims Jason. And release it they have; the Optigan surfaces on both Albarn's Ravenous soundtrack and Blur's 13 album (on the track 'Optigan 1', naturally).

The Optigan is by no means the only 'toy' that sees use in 13. Also knocking around in the control room is a flat, rectangular plastic instrument, spray‑painted metallic green, with three large metal balls resting on top. "Remember the old Speak & Spell?" enquires Jason. "This is one we got from a mad guy in America. These balls are old tank ball‑bearings that sit between the wheel and the track. He's added ring modulators and stuff, and a theremin sort of thing for pitch. He actually said you can learn to play it, but... The first thing you've got to do is just set it up so you're getting a constant tone out of it, and then you play it like a theremin — but so far we've failed to even do that!"

Modified Texas Instruments Speak & Spell (see text), with tank ball‑bearings and (top left) 'photon clarinet'.

"And these switches make it loop around specific bits of speech, but garble it at the same time," continues Tom. "As far as I can make out, he just like buys loads of old kiddies' toys in bulk, whenever he sees the end of a job lot, he buys them all and then just butchers them." The results, as the tank bearings roll around on the pressure‑sensitive surface and the speech is garbled by the additional circuitry, sound like a very sick R2‑D2 from Star Wars.

"He made this other thing, too," says Jason, fishing a smaller spray‑painted box out of a cupboard. "It's called the photon clarinet. It's like a theremin, but it works with light again — the brighter the light, the higher the pitch. It's got two little eyes in there. It just creates a tone, basically, so when you're on stage and the lights are going mad, if you just stick that on stage, plugged up, it'll do mad things for you. It's the abstract thing we're after."

More novelty instruments await in the live room. "That's a bass stylophone," says Tom of an overgrown version of the classic toy keyboard. "I didn't know they existed either, until it arrived! It's got a light‑controllable wah‑wah on it."

Part of the 'sci‑fi' toy used to record drums: the spring stretches across the live room to another horn at the other end, and picks up vibration from the air."Again, you can just stick it on the stage and let the lights do things with it," continues Tom. "You get two sticks to play it with — solo and bass!"

Above the drumkit in the live room hangs another bizarre toy — a pair of blue plastic horns, connected by a long spring. Gently tapping the spring produces a powerful 'zap' noise from the horns, one of which is miked up. "That's a sort of sci‑fi gadget," explains Jason. "You know when you use to get two tin cans and stick a bit of string between them? It's one of those, so you shout down it, and at the other end it sounds like you're millions of miles away."

"We use it for drums and stuff," continues Tom. "You get a really nice snare sound with a mic in either end, a really bright 'ping!' spring sound."

"We used it for the drums on 'Trailerpark'," Jason recalls.

Other toy instruments at 13 include a Wurlitzer Music Learning Machine, a Kalimba (an African instrument consisting of pitched metal tines attached to a resonating wooden body), and a small plastic speech‑training toy. "We did a Massive Attack remix a few months ago and that was the main sound source," says Tom gleefully. "It's just a little kiddies' speech toy, and obviously it'll never be used again, but... basically, anything goes in this place."

Wurlitzer Music Learning Machine teaching keyboard (bottom) with, left to right, bass Stylophone, ordinary Stylophone, Voce Electric Piano module and the childrens' toy used to remix Massive Attack (see text).

Job Lot

"Some things have found their way in here because they're too flakey to tour any more. Like that keyboard over there, that was the original 'Lot 105'," says Jason, indicating the dilapidated Hammond organ which Albarn bought in an auction (hence the title) and used to record the final track on Blur's Parklife album.

"It's been used on loads of stuff," explains Tom. "I think it was used on the end track on Trainspotting that Damon did, while the credits are on. It's a great sound that comes out of it, because it's got a drum machine built in, plus it's got all this extra stuff built in as well, like brassy sounds and synth sounds and all sorts. Then you've also got reverb and stuff on it, and it's got one rotary speaker and one normal — you can route whatever you want through the spinning one and the normal speaker, so you can just have the reverb going through the Leslie, and all your other stuff going through the normal speaker."

The much‑used Lot 105 Hammond organ, with (top) Watkins Copicat tape echo, Selmer valve practice amplifier and Bentley Rhythm Ace drum machine.

Not everything in 13 is a toy. There is also a fair amount of serious studio gear — but Tom and Jason seem to take much the same attitude to both. "This is a harmoniser with keys, so you can harmonise your own vocals as you're singing," says Jason of an ageing Deltalab DL5 'Harmonicomputer'. "It's really old, probably 15 years old or so. It just harmonises. It's good because it's weird. I think it's very early digital, it's very temperamental — it's working, but I think it's that just the design of it is not quite there."

Favourites among the control‑room outboard gear include two Tubetech PE1A valve mic preamps, and a pair of vintage Altec 436B compressors. "These were made in the 1950s," explains Tom. "They've been reconditioned. Very basic controls — we've had release time put in as a mod."

"Dial it in, tell it how much compression you want, and it does what you tell it to do," continues Jason.

"In reality it just tends to squash everything to f**k," admits Tom. "Which is nice."

The way we come to it now, we've got Pro Tools and the analogue stuff, it's a good combination of the old and the new. If you've got both, you can discard the bad bits of each system.

Not every piece of vintage gear has proved a success, though: "We've got an old Roland vocoder over there, and we've never really seemed to get anything decent out of it," says Tom. "So we thought we'd try out this Korg DVP1, and if it's any good maybe swap it and exchange money if necessary."

Having filled their studio full of desirable vintage gear, state‑of‑the‑art studio equipment and novelty toys, Tom and Jason are clearly in their element. Their unusual collection of kit has, however, posed one or two problems. "We had to write out the insurance lists," recalls Jason. "It took ages. We were turning every bit of equipment upside down, getting it out of racks, saying 'Right, serial number for this bit is... How much is this worth? Tom, pick a figure. I think that's worth five hundred quid. Do you think we could get one for five hundred quid? No, OK, it's a thousand...'"

"We've never, ever sold anything or thrown anything away," he continues. "You can imagine what our store is like!"

I'm not sure I can, actually...

Stellar Orbit

Blur's most recent album, 13, was their first not to be produced by Stephen Street, who had been responsible for all their previous albums (and who is, coincidentally, interviewed in this issue of SOS!). Instead, the band chose to work with celebrated remixer and producer William Orbit, who had recently masterminded Madonna's hugely successful Ray Of Light project. "He's a very nice bloke," insists Tom. "One of those people that even if he's not really sure who you are or what you do, if you're a friend of the band, he'll make time to come and say hello and chat with you."

"It was a completely different way of working for him," says Jason. "Normally, he's like me or Tom, you know — someone will present him with something they want him to do a remix of, that's what he's used to, or he'll be doing his own stuff. I think Blur's the first live band that he's actually gone in to produce. So he had to fit in, 'cause we've been doing the same thing for the last ten years — always the same people all the time, the same engineer — the only person who changes is the producer. So rather than us changing to the way we work, the producer, as soon as he comes to work with us, has a scary moment of having to change to the way we work."

"I mean, Stephen Street's got a RADAR, so RADAR versus Pro Tools, that's a big difference already. Stephen's still very much in the sort of pop corner," continues Tom.

"Because Stephen's done so many Blur albums, we all evolved at the same time," explains Jason. "Our format of working and how you work at a studio all grew at the same time. Then soon as William Orbit came in, he was doing his thing and we were doing our thing, and we had to sort of meet in the middle. The first few days it was like him sitting in the corner just letting the band do what they wanted to do. At the end of it he'd ask me and John Smith, the engineer, how we thought the day went, and we'd boost his confidence and advise him as to what he should be doing and shouldn't be doing."

The 13 album is by some way Blur's most experimental yet, and many of its sonic twists and turns sound as if they must have been done at the mixing stage — especially given that Orbit used a Pro Tools rig to record the band. However, as Jason explains, Pro Tools was mainly used for editing: most of the sonic weirdness, even the unusual panning and phasing effects, were captured at the recording stage. "A lot of it was recorded live," insists Jason. "Like the beginning of 'Battle'. It's me holding one microphone and Orbit holding another microphone and Damon playing keyboards, and we're just walking round the keyboards, and it phases and disappears and then comes back."

"Even though you might think it's a mix thing, it's actually being f**ked up at the recording stage," agrees Tom.

"What William Orbit did was recorded us live, basically, and then stuck it all into Pro Tools and chopped and pasted and did what he wanted to do," explains Jason. "There were loads of DATs. You can imagine how many DATs he used to bring home with him. He'd be up all night!"