Versatile producer/engineer Nigel Bates was one of the original devotees of the PPG Wave digital synthesizer, an instrument that is still a mainstay of his music. These days, he's also enthusiastic in his use of the latest software‑based mixing tools. Paul Wiffen finds out more about his fusion of the classic and the cutting‑edge. Extra material by Sam Inglis and Matt Bell.
Nigel Bates is perhaps best known as the programmer who created some of the most famous and instantly recognisable synth sounds used on '80s records, thanks to his widely acknowledged mastery of the innovative PPG Wave digital synthesizer. A guitar player from an early age, engineer, synth programmer and producer for acts such as M (of 'Pop Muzik' fame), Nigel set up Ambiance Studios in the early '80s, frustrated at the lack of equipment to be found in most commercial studios. He was determined that his studio should be filled with enough gear that it would be unnecessary to call on hire companies for anything, and in the synth‑driven pop climate of the times, the gamble paid off — Ambiance became a popular New Romantic‑era recording studio. Building on this work, Nigel also became a programmer to some top producers of the day, including Colin Thurston, who worked with Duran Duran, Howard Jones, Spandau Ballet, and Kajagoogoo at the height of their fame.
After a break from the music business and several years spent in France, Nigel returned to the UK and set up a new studio in Sussex with the help of specialist studio and Dynaudio monitor designer Andy Munro. The studio contains many of the now‑vintage instruments from the Ambiance days, and these still play a major role in his current work as a producer/mixer and as a composer of production/library music. However, Bates's recording methods are far from retro, and he enthusiastically embraces the flexibility provided by MIDI + Audio sequencers, software plug‑ins and virtual instruments, as well as the editing and processing features provided by his Digidesign Pro Tools system.
Given that he still uses his vintage gear extensively, Nigel clearly doesn't feel that these software tools have quite evolved to the stage where they might be all that he needs: "Generally speaking I am finding plug‑in synths a valuable addition to all the classic stuff, but it's difficult to say whether they could ever replace the hardware completely. On one hand, there are some sounds in Native Instruments' Reaktor which are very PPG‑ish, and some of the sounds out of Bitheadz's Retro AS1 sound just like the Oberheims, so obviously they are getting pretty close, but then the PPGs do some pretty unique stuff.
"There's just something about the original machines — probably the hum! — which never seems to be captured by newer technology, even the Waldorf XT2 which has the same wavetables. I have been using them since very early on — I used to do all the PPG sessions with Colin Thurston on them. There was a period where I had terrible trouble on the reliability side: the Wave 2.3 went off to all the experts to get repaired and came back exactly the same; they never really repaired it properly. Then I put it into the village electrical shop down here for a general clean‑up and within about three hours it was working perfectly, and has done so ever since! There were always problems relating to the construction, like with the boards, where the original etching fluid hadn't been completely cleaned off and used to eat through. I think the local guys actually got rid of that sort of problem. I've got a complete set of spare boards, but I haven't needed them so far.
"The PPG Waveterm is another joy [PPG's computer/sampling system — see the Retrozone feature in SOS December 1996 — Ed]. There are still things you can do with that that you can't even get close to on other systems. I love the Waldorf Microwave XT as an instrument in its own right, though, because it has the wavetables from all the PPGs, right from the original Palm through to the Wave 2.2, 2.3 and so on; it makes for a really interesting instrument. Other favourites of mine include the ARP 2600 — the keyboard is up in the writing room, as I now trigger it via MIDI using the Kenton mod — and the Prophet VS, which is very PPG‑like, but it takes a lot these days for me to be impressed by a new hardware synthesizer, because it's all been done. For example, the Roland JV3080 is just a bigger version of the 1080 or 2080. There's nothing new or outstanding in them, just more polyphony and stuff. The Virus TDM plug‑in is a great synth, and this seems to me where the interesting developments are. When you look at all the space these hardware synths take up, it's difficult to justify getting any more."
About a year ago, the feeling that there was little innovation in the world of hardware synths led Nigel to experiment with software. Already a committed user of Pro Tools for mixing, he was used to the idea of audio processing plug‑ins, but got off to a mixed start with virtual instruments: "The first ones I tried were Retro AS1 and Unity DS1 from Bitheadz. Retro was great and worked really well, but I didn't really get on with Unity, because I couldn't send audio from it out through the Pro Tools hardware interfaces without monopolising them, so I couldn't hear the audio I had in Pro Tools and the software sampler at the same time. I tried it with the Arcadia system in Vision and the MAS 2.0 [MOTU Audio System] in Digital Performer and it was better then, but you still had to record the sampler under one of those sequencers, and then reboot to get the sampler to output through Pro Tools, which I found unacceptable. Now Bitheadz have made use of DirectConnect in version 2 of Unity, it's brilliant [see page 176 for more on DirectConnect, which allows you to route the output of stand‑alone applications such as Unity into Pro Tools in software — Ed]. I had a track running here the other day with eight or nine soft synth parts running from Retro and Unity plus Native Instruments' Reaktor and the TDM Virus and it was running absolutely fine on my 300MHz G3.
"Obviously, the plug‑in synths are newer than plug‑in effects, and there are still some things they can't do. I find I still need to use my hardware Emu samplers from time to time — I've yet to find a really good sampler in the computer. But the software‑based stuff is definitely getting there."
Full Effects
Nigel's beloved PPG Wave 2.3 and Waveterm sampling system. An old Roland SH09 nestles on top of the Waveterm.
Bates's slight reservations about the current generation of soft synths and samplers contrast with his almost evangelical enthusiasm for the plug‑in effects and processors he uses during mixing. "On my latest album project, the Beat Poets, there is no outboard processing gear at all. All the compression, reverb and so on is done via plug‑ins. Even on the guitar I use Line 6's Amp Farm with Pro Tools. Sometimes I use my hardware Line 6 amplifier and a few other things, but in the main, all the effect processing is now inside the computer.
"The plug‑In effects I have, Line 6 Amp Farm, the Focusrite stuff, the Waves products, Antares Mic Modeler and Auto‑Tune — which I try to use as little as possible, as you hear it being over‑used all the time on the radio — they are all great. But there is a worrying trend developing. All these new plug‑ins appearing for VST and MAS 2.0 all work just as well as the TDM version, but the price difference is huge. Look at Channel Strip (which is brilliant, by the way): something like £700 for the TDM version, and £250 or so for MAS! And there's no difference. It's the same with Auto‑Tune, 500 quid for TDM and two hundred and something for VST. Even though there may be more people out there who can use the VST version, if it's the same product, why should the pro user have to stump up the extra? OK, so the TDM version usually comes out first, but that's an awfully big difference in price. It wouldn't be so bad if when you bought the TDM version you got the VST one as well. Some do that already, like the Waves Gold Bundle, which works under TDM, MAS or VST, whatever.
"I often use MAS Plug‑ins in Digital Performer and I like the way that even when you switch to DAE under Performer and the MAS plug‑ins disappear, when you switch back to MAS, they all reappear! The opposite applies as well — TDM plug‑ins disappear when you switch to MAS, but they reappear when you go back to DAE. You can have two sets of plug‑ins saved in a Performer song, even if you can only hear one at any given moment. The way I use this is that when I want to put the MAS plug‑ins on something, I switch to MAS, bounce the track with the effect on, and then switch back to DAE and then I can use the resulting track in Pro Tools. If I ever need to edit the effect, I can just switch back to MAS in Performer. The latency in MAS is never an issue, because I am always doing this with track already recorded, rather than trying to apply MAS plug‑ins during actual recording. Any live stuff is always recorded under TDM, and then if it needs an effect which is not available under TDM, I'll put that on afterwards as described, whether I do it in Performer, Vision or Logic.
"I should also mention the DUY DAD stuff while I'm on the subject of plug‑ins. I have just finished working on mixes for Paul Carrack's solo album [ex‑vocalist and keyboard player with Squeeze, Mike And The Mechanics, and many others — Ed], and we used the DUY Valve plug‑in on a lot of stuff. We found that we got the most amazing bass sounds recording the bass with the Renaissance Compressor through the DAD Valve with the pusher set quite high; on other things which needed warming up, such as the drum kits, we also stuck them through Valve and it was brilliant. I think Valve is a bit misunderstood; people tend to look at it, see all these pictures and click on them, but there's more to it than that. If you just play about with the sliders, that's when it really works! The DUY DAD is a lot of money, but I think it's worth it just for the Valve."
Hands‑on Experience
Nigel's massive gear collection contains several synths left over from the days of Ambiance Studios, as well as more recent purchases (clockwise from extreme left): Roland XP50, Apple G3 Mac, (in rack underneath) Sequential Prophet VS Rack, Oberheim Matrix 6R and Matrix 1000, (at rear of work surface) Yamaha DX7, Sequential Circuits Prophet 5, Korg M1R & M1REX, Yamaha TX802, Roland MKS rack synths, (on top of ARP Axxe near the ceiling) Roland SH101, ARP Axxe, ARP 2600, ARP Odyssey, acoustic guitar, the PPG corner as seen in the picture on page 200, Roland A50 master keyboard, Akai MPC60 sampling workstation, Korg Mono/Poly.
A common complaint against software‑based systems by hardware purists is that they are more difficult to set up and control, thanks to the replacement of dedicated knobs and sliders by mice and keyboards. Nigel Bates suggests that the key factor in learning to use any piece of equipment is understanding how it works, and that, perversely, those who find virtual control surfaces confusing do so precisely because they haven't undergone a traditional training using hardware rackmount gear: "Some people reckon they can't use this plug‑in stuff because there are no physical knobs to tweak. I've been doing this for so long that I know what I am going for, and there's no problem in adjusting the parameters if you know what they do. I think the big problem for people is that they don't know what they're doing, because they haven't gone through this long learning process over the years. That's when you have problems with on‑screen adjustment — when you don't know what the parameters mean and the effect they have.
"I work a lot with Ben Fenner, who has engineered for David Bowie, Brian Eno, and Steve Hackett, and we were discussing exactly this. He said that with plug‑ins, it's very easy for people to go 'Oh, look. Classic Compressor preset', so they put it on something, but they don't know why they've put it on, and what's worse, they don't know how to adjust it to make it more appropriate. So they just twiddle around with the knobs on screen, and end up with something that is over‑compressed, because unlike us older‑generation guys, they've not learnt the theory behind the technology and how to use it. There is so much stuff coming at people now and so cheaply, they're not learning the basics of one piece of technology before the next hits them. There's a huge gap opening up between what the gear does and people's ability to use it. Half the problem is that each piece of gear does so much. The average synth now features a compressor, amongst loads of other effects, and it will be used on half the patches, but even if people look and find that, they don't know what a compressor does and why it's there. As Ben says, there's just not the skill there now, the next generation of engineers is just not coming through. How many engineers out there now have ever recorded a drum kit or an acoustic guitar properly?"
Moreover, as Nigel explains, even so‑called 'electronic' music can benefit from more traditional instruments and techniques: "I often use acoustic instruments in conjunction with delays and other processing to create an unreal‑sounding ambience or effect, so acoustic instruments often contribute in a fundamental way to some of what might be perceived as the 'electronic' sounds I end up with. On the other hand, I do like some of the most recent strides that have been taking in physical modelling technology around guitars, the Line 6 amps and the Roland VG8. All the Gibson 335 and other 'recognisable' guitar sounds on Paul Carrack's album are in fact the VG8, and you can't really tell the difference. They just used two or three of them live on his tour and it works really well — no changing guitars twice per song."
Sequences Of Sequencers
Another shot of Nigel's main working area reveals his Waldorf Microwave XT, Mackie 32•8 8‑buss mixer, extensive monitoring, and Roland Super Jupiter hardware programmer, as well as assorted outboard gear amassed over the years. Oh, and a fondness for Marc Bolan is evident too...Such is the complexity of modern software sequencers that many musicians and producers find learning to use only one of them quite challenging enough. Nigel Bates, however, is happy to switch platforms as necessary, and seems comfortable with almost all of the major packages: "I mainly use Pro Tools now, especially for mixing, and Digital Performer quite a lot. Logic I'll use if I have to, like when I work with Ben Fenner, who uses it all the time. I still use Studio Vision a lot, especially if I want to put something together quickly. I like what Logic can do, I just don't like the look of it. The American sequencers have always just felt right to me. Digital Performer looks great, but the writing is so small, because you can't do a vertical zoom. It would be all right if you had the Hubble telescope to look at it through..."
Frankie Goes To... Burgess Hill
"Not many people know that I actually did the bass sample used on all the Frankie Goes To Hollywood stuff. That was done with my Kramer bass up in the writing room, sampled into the PPG. It was back when a friend of mine, Andy Thomas, took over customer support of PPG from Syco. I used to do loads of sampling into the PPG, because the library was appalling. I used to send some of it over to Wolfgang Palm of PPG, but a lot of it I would just give on disk to Andy Thomas. Then of course he would get potential customers in who wanted the system, but the factory library was non‑existent, so he would end up giving these disks to people who bought systems. so a lot of the sounds that you hear on the records from that time were done in my old studio at Burgess Hill. I hear them now and I think, 'Good God, that was done on such‑and‑such a night as an experiment.' Some of the bass sounds were actually mistakes in a way. If you look at them on the Waveterm, you can see that the waveform starts very differently and you can see where it is joined together with the main sample. This came from the PPG not having cleared its sample memory properly, so you got one part of one sample and the rest of another. But it sounds great, with such a sharp transient that it cut through even on transistor‑radio speakers where you don't normally hear the bass. Those samples ended up on records by Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Propaganda and so on.
"The problem I found back on sessions in those days was that people would call you up wanting PPG or Fairlight sounds on their tracks, but because it all had a limited frequency range, the tracks would end up sounding really small. Although everything would cut through, there was no real bass and no high end. Of course, it sounded fine on the radio, which couldn't cover those frequencies anyway, but not anywhere else. When you listen back to some of that '80s stuff with LinnDrums and things on it, some of it is quite feeble really! It was good at the time and some of the sounds were so novel, but with hindsight it's not so great. I remember the first Linn and I was so pleased not to have to be working with drummers any more, I didn't notice how flat it was. That's why in the end I got out of sampling.
"You see interviews with people who claim they never use any presets, but whatever they make up has been done somewhere. I've got about 4,000 banks of DX7 sounds. I manage all my huge libraries mainly with Opcode Galaxy and to a lesser extent with MOTU Unisyn. So if I start making up a DX7 sound, I've got something similar already somewhere."
Having already gone through the stage of creating sample libraries of his own, Bates is now more than happy to make use of commercial sources: "A lot of the Spectrasonics stuff is very good. Apart from Distorted Reality, I like the Bizarre Guitar. Other sources I have liked recently are the Big Bad Beats CDs, although most things have something on them I like when I'm going through. As far as sound library is concerned, I only get the CD‑ROMs, I can't really see the point of getting the ordinary CDs and having to spend hours sampling and looping it all. Life's simply not long enough. I spent so many years sampling into PPGs and Fairlights when there was no other way of doing it, I can't face it any more really."
Nigel Bates — Selected Gear
| SYNTHS/KEYBOARDS • Alesis Quadrasynth SR.
SAMPLERS/SAMPLE PLAYERS • Akai S1000.
| DRUM MACHINES/MODULES & SEQUENCERS • Akai MPC60 sampling sequencer.
COMPUTERS & RECORDING • Alesis ADAT (x4).
SOFTWARE • Access Virus software synth.
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