British producer, composer and musician Neil Davidge has worked with David Bowie, Snoop Dogg, UNKLE and Damon Albarn, as well as composing music for TV and film and releasing a 2014 solo album, Slo Light. Asked to recall a sonic highlight from his career, he nominates Massive Attack’s 1998 classic ‘Teardrop’.
Neil Davidge: The song ‘Teardrop’ originally started out as two completely separate pieces.
“The writing of any Massive Attack track can be a fairly chaotic affair, in a good way. A lot of mistakes and unusual spontaneous things will happen in the studio and from there, something unique emerges. The song ‘Teardrop’ originally started out as two completely separate pieces, ideas that we later combined, ditching the original backing for the song, keeping only the harpsichord part and the original demo vocal idea Liz had put down.”
Key Keys
“The harpsichord was the first part of the song. That came about from me doodling around in the studio in the morning before the rest of guys came in. Andrew ‘Mushroom’ Vowles, often the first one in, said, ‘What’s that? It’s great.’ I recorded it in and he found some beats which we sampled into my Akai MPC60, we added a simple piano part and pulled together a rough arrangement which we later gave to Liz so that she could come up with melody and lyric ideas.
“We’d decided to ditch the original backing for the song and combine it with this other track I’d always liked; I rewrote the chordal/piano arrangement for the song with keyboardist David Jenkins. The piano part would eventually be pared down by Robert Del Naja and I, pulling notes out until it still formed a strong foundation but kept the sound ‘open’, leaving more to the imagination. Robert is a very visual artist, in both senses of the word. I’m much the same, I often think of making music as painting with sound. I think ‘Teardrop’ is a perfect example of that.
“The harpsichord was from a Kurzweil weighted master keyboard, I think it was a PC88. The core of the piano was also the Kurzweil, although the chord roots were augmented by a sample I’d made via my Roland S770 sampler of an upright piano at the studio we rented space in. All the low notes were recorded in octaves. And we ran the piano sample through a Leslie cabinet in the studio which can mainly be heard right at the end of the song. The choir sound was a Mellotron choir sample from a Roland JV‑1080.
“The drum loop of ‘Teardrop’ formed the basis for the other track, along with some of the other sonics that would end up used. There’s a double‑time version of the loop that comes in later in the song, put through the MPC’s onboard delay. The bass sound came from my Moog Prodigy.
“The guitar sustain and ‘clack’ sound I’d sampled and pitched around from a jam we did with Massive Attack guitarist Angelo Bruschini. There’s a Hammond stab which was the only sound that remained from a full Hammond session we’d recorded with the touring band keyboardist. We kept paring that part down till it was all that was left! Elizabeth Fraser’s vocals were re‑recorded on my Neumann U87, through an Avalon VT‑737, via a DDA AMR24 desk onto an Otari 24‑track, which was then transferred into Cubase Audio where I pulled together the final comp.”
Evolving Mixing
“Mark ‘Spike’ Stent mixed the track at Olympic Studios in London, Studio 3, on an SSL G‑series with a host of outboard gear. He left the mix up overnight so I could tweak it whilst everyone one else had gone home. I stayed up all night fine‑tuning, mainly balances, vocal rides etc, but I would have likely been tweaking the original sounds because I had all my gear running live: the Roland S770 Sampler, the MPC60, the Moog Prodigy, Juno‑60, the JV‑1080 and Cubase Audio. It was great to have the flexibility of not running from tape back then. As Spike would evolve the mix, we could tweak the arrangement and sounds at source, although the ‘multitrack’ was actually printed after we’d mixed the album, so wasn’t arguably fully representative of that final mix.
“It was mastered from DAT at Metropolis Studios in London. We had also printed it to a Studer A800, but mastering engineer Tim Young favoured the DAT.”