Hardware Playground
Vintage keyboards at Club Ralph: clockwise from top left, ARP 2600, Roland Jupiter 8, Minimoog and Wurlitzer EP200.
True to his word, Ralph has stacks of hardware synths and drum machines in his studio, including classics like the ARP 2600, Roland Jupiter 8, SH101, TR808 and JX8P, Korg Minipops, MonoPoly and MS20, Linn LM2, Moog Voyager and Minimoog, Solina String Ensemble, Yamaha DX7, Oberheim DMX and more. His control room also contains a large amount of outboard including units from Neve, EMT, Tube-Tech, Eventide, AMS, Yamaha, Urei, Valley People, Empirical Labs, Manley, Roland and Lexicon.
This rack of classic keyboards and drum machines includes (from top, left to right): Roland Juno 60 and Korg Minipops; Roland JX-8P and TR-808; Korg MonoPoly and Linn LM2; Moog Voyager and Korg MS20; Solina String Ensemble and Oberheim DMX; and the immortal Yamaha DX7.“The biggest piece of outboard is the desk,” stresses Ralph, “which gives me separation and clarity at a critical point in the beginning, when things are in their rawest state, and I need to make certain decisions. I also make extensive use of the EQ and compression on my SSL desk.
Mark Ralph’s favourite ‘in the box’ equaliser is the software version of the GML 8200, two of which occupy pride of place in this Club Ralph rack. Also visible are TLA and Tube-Tech compressors, Lexicon PCM70 reverb, SSL X-Logic rack, Eventide Omnipressor compressor and Groove Tubes Trio guitar preamp."In addition, there’s my outboard. I find that outboard compressors behave in certain ways that I can’t get from software compressors. Of course, there are also things that in-the-box compressors can do that hardware compressors can’t, the major benefit of software being that you can automate all parameters. But my outboard compressors are my go-tos on specific things, like the Neve 33611 on lead vocals, the Tube-Tech LCA-2B on piano and guitars, Distressors on bass, as it adds a little distortion, Manley Vari-Mu on backing vocals and on strings, and my Valley People 610 on drums in parallel.”
World Music
With Clean Bandit often writing in Jack Patterson’s room downstairs, it’s easy for Ralph to occasionally drop in to see what the band is up to. “But I have never co-written a Clean Bandit song,” the producer notes. “When they write it’s usually Jack and Grace [Chatto] in a room with one or two other writers, and writing with more than four people in a room becomes unmanageable. So they tend to come to me once they have the song written. Usually there are a whole bunch of ideas there, sometimes nearly finished, sometimes it is more of a bare-bones situation, but it normally does not yet sound like a record. Jack will have his project in Ableton, and we’ll transfer everything to Pro Tools, and will then work on finishing the production and the mix. Jack plays saxophone and keyboards, I play guitar, Grace plays ’cello and Luke [Patterson] plays drums, so we complement each other. For the new album we recorded many of Grace’s ’cello parts in my live room, and Jack enjoys recording strings at RAK, and also likes to record his piano parts there.
“There are a whole range of guest artists on the new album, some of them very well known, some less so. Sometimes a featured artist that Clean Bandit collaborates with co-writes the song in the room with them, but more often they send over a demo to the featured artist. The demo will have a guide vocal by one of the songwriters, and we then may change the song again following input from the featured artist. A song is never finished until it’s finished. I don’t have any qualms about making changes right until the end. The vocal chops on the demo often are not repeatable by the featured artist, so they tend to remain, and the vocal chops singer gets a credit as a backing vocalist. But nine out of 10 times the featured vocals are done at a stage when I am already involved.
“For example, for the new album we remotely recorded one song with a Mexican singer, who happened to be in Madrid. We used Skype for this. She was in a studio, and the engineer connected the output of the desk to the inputs of Skype. There also was a talkback mic in the room there, and the engineer had a plug-in called Mutomatic, which automatically switched to talkback the moment he pressed stop. We could see the singer on the screen and talk to her as if she was in the room, while they were listening to a mic we had plugged into our laptop. Because we were going capital city to capital city there was a good Internet connection, and we could hear full quality audio via our monitors, without any delay. It worked seamlessly. For the track ‘Solo’ we also recorded Demi Lovato remotely, using FaceTime for communication. She was out in the sticks near Nashville and Jack and Grace had to coach her via a really bad connection, which was very challenging, but that also worked out in the end.
“On ‘Solo’ we were thinking of all the different styles that we could throw in, so we have reggae and dancehall, American pop vocals and Indian-influenced Bollywood strings. On the drum side there also were some trap influences. The 808 and the really fast hi-hat patterns that are typical of trap are on the whole of the new Clean Bandit album. We did a lot of experimentation with the strings on ‘Solo’. There’s a combination of lush-sounding strings, which were recorded at RAK, Grace’s ’cello, which was recorded in my room, and some more strings that were recorded downstairs in Jack’s studio. We stylised some of the strings to make them sound like Bollywood strings, and also as if they were sampled.
“When you sample strings from a record and you cut the audio, you often cut the reverb tails, which makes it sound unnatural. In trying to recreate that, we added some reverb to the strings, bounced that, and then when we chopped the audio, to get these unnatural stops in the reverb. Those are the kinds of things that make something feel triggered, even though the strings were actually recorded live. We also put these strings in NI Kontakt and automated pitch-bend to get them to naturally swoop up. The idea was to get the strings to sound similar to the strings in ‘Toxic’ by Britney Spears.
“It is difficult to make classical music instruments sound exciting these days, so we kind of harked back to an era of rudimentary sampling techniques, trying to copy the imperfections of an approach that gives you a rough edge that you don’t have in pristinely recorded strings. Character is being ironed out of records at the moment, because everything is tuned and so on, but real instruments add colour and dynamics to electronic records, which is why we’re keen on using them. Jack also created a sampled guitar part in ‘Solo’ using the AmpleSound plug-in, which gives you a pseudo-realistic acoustic guitar. There’s something fascinating about an intentionally fake guitar, but in this case what you hear is a combination of the AmpleSound guitar and a live guitar. We mixed that into a hybrid that we found interesting.”