In The Studio with Public Service Broadcasting

hello I'm Jay wilgus Esquire and I play in the band at Public Service broadcasting this is our Southeast London Studio sort of Hub base we use this for recording and rehearsing nominally known as jackar Studios and I'm yeah here to talk to you future music about how the studio is set up why it's set up and um kind of things we get up to here I spend most of the time in here probably on my own because this is where the records are written so it's a nice big space this is the biggest of the of the few rooms that we have here that are all interconnected and um and nice big desk racks laid out how I wanted it uh the desk was kind of if if you want to go as far as calling it designed by me but designed by me and sort of ordered as flat pack and assembled all the rack stuff put in so everything's the right height the right place the right kind of number of units to fit what we need um all the acoustic treatment was done by me as well so it's it's all very sort of Rough and Ready like very rectangular um but it does the job in terms of keeping the room very dry we're a bit limited by quite low ceilings here at about 2.4 M so you're never going to get a big open expansive sound so the thinking behind the acoustic treatment across the whole uh Studio was keep it dry keep it controlled and um yeah then kind of treat any any you know add any kind of artificial revb after the fact I suppose uh the studio is based around a Max studio which I mostly use logic for but also use Reaper for live stuff for live pre-production and we're running a series of universal uh audio Apollos so got two Apollo 16s of different eras a silver face and a black face and then an even older Apollo twin just to get us up to 302 outputs I think and the main mixing Hub is this Neeve uh R&D R NE designs 560 down here which uh kind of is the The Hub of the studio it's got talk back on it it's got various monitoring sources and um handles all the outputs from the uh the uad stuff obviously various uad plugins running on anything we do um got the crucial bit of equipment for most studos which is the patch Bay where you wear everything interconnects so all the synths you can see behind me all the stuff in these racks this additional rack down here the space Echo all the inputs from the drum room next door and the drum room over the way all come here um and appear on that patch Bay and from there um yeah we go about sort of you know making noises sound the way we want to try and make them sound we got various kind of synths to hand we've got the Nord stage three which is the sort of main midi keyboard controller for the studio as well as being a useful piano and electric piano kind of uh Sound Source in itself we've got the I can never bring myself to say Moog but I suppose it's Moog Voyager rme um which is speaks for itself got the decads dream which is this kind of modern black Corporation cs80 um inspired synth which is very kind of evocative very rich sounding and then various other bits and Bobs really got keer for guitar stuff and an octat track for kind of sequencing and processing and kind of interesting sound generation and a couple of Reverb units as well as an electron digitone sitting on this little drawer here um so got the AO bam and the chase bl/ meris cxm 1978 and yeah the digitone and um all you know relatively easy to use all ready to go no barriers in the way of creativity if something wants to be plugged in and used it's kind of usually pretty simple and pretty quick to get up and running you don't have to be moving stuff around while you're doing it yeah um that's kind of the main Hub of how this place works and how music gets made yeah so one of the first things I'd like to show you in in a bit more detail is the electron octat track which is uh I think this is the mark 2 the second kind of iteration that they brought out um still eagerly awaiting a Mark II if anyone from electron is is listening um because there's definitely a lot more that this could do but it's fantastic kind of tool for manipulation and sound design and sequencing um so this comes in really handy when you've kind of got a sound that you need to animate or when you've got something that is kind of quite a staticy thing and you want to get a bit more movement into it it I had an idea for a song that had a kind of guitar line that I thought was great and until I actually recorded it as a demo at which point I realized it got really boring and annoying really quickly and I didn't really know what to do with it from that point so what I started doing was just mucking around with kind of um Reverb tales and stuff and just kind of um using the same bass notes it was like a three note cord just play it into the auto bam which is kind of like an 80s rever box and um you know once i' kind of got the three notes in there and got a bit of kind of modulated Reverb going on just taking the freeze button and so I went from a kind of arpeggiated guitar part to just having a kind of syn the pad sound which is a guitar that just sounds like this so that is just a frozen kind of Reverb Tale of Three notes on a guitar um and then I pitch that down put an LFO to it with a certain Rhythm um added quite a lot of distortion added a filter sweep on the kind of scene control here and so you go from this kind of sound of uh potentially texturally interesting but musically and kind of rhythmically boring to having a sound like this [Music] so that's pitch down an octave and then add the octave above for even more kind of energy and excitement [Music] really and just play around with the Reverb and um the Distortion [Music] especially and that's really where the whole kind of Rhythm and uh idea for the track Electro the new record came from um everything kind of ended up working to that same Rhythm so when the drums were recorded and kind of came in it's with that original sound that you can hear it's all kind of sequenced together that same pulsing d d d That's all from the original sequence which is done on the electron and all just from a basic idea of how can I get some movement into you know into a sound that I like but that I think could be a lot more interesting and the electron units in general are great for that the sequences on them are amazing in terms of like this kind of granular level of level of control you can have um so stopping that LFO for those two notes you know when it's um just that kind of sequencing on it's really easy to do really quick once you've worked with it enough to become kind of quite confident with it it's quick to work with um and it's just it's very kind of tactile it's very Hands-On you're not looking at a screen you're not kind of you know you're actually working with your hands you're working with your brain and you're just getting these musical ideas kind of out um via these unusual and interesting Tools in a quick and expressive way so it's it's really an invaluable thing to have in the studio and I don't see it leaving it's kind of Pride position anytime soon I mixed the first four records in a space probably about a third as big as this which was the back 2/3 of a single garage on the end of our house here in southeast London and um you know we very lucky I was very lucky to have that space to work in but it was also you know it got cramped and as more and more gear was acred as more and more gear tends to be ACR um it just got more and more kind of oppressive and kind of semi claustrophobic and then I was lucky enough in 2019 when I was writing our record bright magic I was lucky enough to go to Berlin for 10 months and rent a room at hanza Studios which was beautiful and large and had loads of space and had natural light and it had everything you could possibly want in the studio sounded incredible um you know really prestigious address and then moved back from Berlin to my garage and was really rather depressed so I set about trying to find some where local and affordable to rent in London which is not an easy feat thankfully through a friend of a friend I heard about this place being kind of put together and was in contact with a guy who kind of built these rooms as properly SPC kind of rooms within rooms you know specially treated so that you don't get much sound if anything at all from outside um apart from when the kids from neighboring flats are running across the roof but um that happens relatively rarely uh yeah so I heard about about these rooms coming available and um ended up taking on four of them uh asking for these two that are kind of sitting next to each other to be knocked together so we could have a small drum Booth attached to the main Li room live room and then the other two kind of one for storage and one for one for additional kind of live performance really um and that's how it ended up being this so the room was it was a shell when I got it there was nothing here um there's plaster board on the walls and uh I took the decision to try and make it have some kind of greenery in it so we've got this kind of green Motif wallpaper um just to try and get a bit of the outside inside when you haven't got any natural daylight and uh yeah just try and make it a a nice looking kind of nice feeling relaxing space to walk into um and a nice place to spend time making music and thankfully uh I don't know how it happened but thankfully it seems to have worked I'd say uh my approach to syn has kind of changed a bit over the years as well in um you I've been lucky to start kind of getting hold of more physical analog syns um and kind of embracing them for their idiosyncrasies as much as using soft syns I don't really use that many soft syns if any actually these days um and one of the ones I got a hold of for the last record was cor Monopoly which I'm sure many of your um readers viewers will be familiar with anyway but as a kind of nuts and bolts explainer of it it's it's a weird synth um I don't think it was very successful when it came out because a lot of people couldn't really get the head round what's it for you know I've got the poly six beneath it and that was a lot easier to understand it's kind of similar to a Juno six voice analog synth with kind of fun modulation and stuff like that on it but not that hard to kind of get your head round but the Monopoly has such a kind of odd architecture um but I think if you're willing to kind of embrace that and play with it and muck around with it then that's when the inspiration comes and that's a whole song just came out of you know experiencing this for the first proper time time mucking around a bit and then finding that because of the way that you play it it lent itself to writing a song and yeah as I said pretty much a whole piece of music just came out of it like that which is worth its weight and gold um so what you've got you've got four oscillators uh they're all individually controllable um you can switch the waveform per oscillator you can have differentiation of tuning per oscillator you can have uh octave per oscillator so you can have individual level control per oscillator and it's most simple you can just have it all in [Music] unison and that's not working analog syns great um so yeah that's you know that's Unison that's fine um easy to get your head round I suppose it can be quite a big sound um where it becomes a bit more interesting uh there's two ways it becomes a bit more interesting I think uh one is if you're using the arpeggiator and you've slowed the um slowed the pator right the way down because then what happens when you play a note is it Cycles through the uh oscillator's Voice by voice so you can take something as simple as just one note and because of the four different oscillators it's going to cycle through them I've got them set to different pitches slightly different wave forms just going to play one note and you know [Music] it's a very simple kind of illustration of it but because of the way that you can kind of control each oscillator individually like that so easily so visually right in front of you and you know you can Muck around with it in a much more Artful way than that when you're better versed with the instrument um you know you get these kind of interesting patterns out of it but the other way and the way that actually ended up working for the song itself was if you're kind of holding holding down say three notes which are the three notes that are held down those are kind of sustained in the background but if you then add a base note to that and this fourth voice don't know if you can see but the three oscillator lights for oscillators 1 2 and three are already lit up so those are active and then as soon as I add this one they actually all re-trigger so you get this kind of like really cool pulsing pad effect um and it could it ended up sound like this for the for the record [Music] and again I don't think I would have had the idea to play a Synn like it doesn't sound the same anyway when you do it like that so it's because of the unique architecture behind it and again the physicality of actually getting your hands on something unusual that you end up with that and for the chorus part I ended up kind of doing a little threeway arpeggio inverted at times so the first time around it would [Music] go second [Music] time but because those first three oscillators are tuned to uh one octave above normal normal you kind of get that differentiation in Pitch between so even playing the same three notes just in a different order you're kind of getting that variation and that interest in there and then just adding bits of noise in there you know [Music] [Music] yeah it's just really fun and um I think if you're having fun while you're making music then uh you're more likely to make interesting music I think I think the biggest challenge we've got in this space is the ceiling height probably um because it's always going to restrict what you can do in terms of getting for example a really good drum sound um just as as kind of a lower ceiling it's is always going to feel a little bit oppressive I think that was why I ended up going with the kind of you know really dry the room out have a lot of acoustic treatment um you know a really short Reverb time not just in here but in the other kind of acoustic environments and um and then set about ways of kind of trying to recreate a realistic kind of physical space if you need to when you're kind of trying to create a much bigger drum sound um you know after the fact so yeah that's the biggest challenge here is is really is just the the physical size of the rooms but having said that I'm also extremely aware of how lucky we are to have somewhere like this you know in in a London that's afford and run by decent people um and you know to have found it close to where I live and uh where we can all kind of operate out of as a base it's very very fortunate set of circumstances for us uh another tool that I find really useful um kind of Sonic I suppose sound design wise uh something that a lot of people are going to be very familiar with if not the original units and certainly the emulations is the space Echo so I bought one of these and then swiftly realized that I needed two so I could have stereo effects going on um they're not identical units in any anywhere at all they're both kind of calibrated to different levels they both have different ages of taping them um they both react differently to different kind of signals but that doesn't really bother me because bother me because I'm not really using them to be kind of pristine sources of echo I'm using them to kind of be almost like agents of chaos really um and I think what I've learned from kind of years of working more on the screen and with software stuff versus actually having kind of physical units here is that there are moments of creativity that you're more likely to find if you have kind of large physical tactile controls in front of you that you're just kind of playing around with um you know there's a reason they call it playing music and I think it's because you should be encouraged to be creative you should be encouraged to play with um the tools that are at your disposal that's where a lot of ideas come from and if you're solely restricted to using a mouse and a keyboard and kind of stuff on screen you can get great results that way but I find it's not always the most spontaneous way of working and as I say these little agents of chaos just much more fun um in some respects so I use them to get a bit of grit on things I use them to get a bit of extra Rhythm on things and what I find them really super useful for is as kind of as almost audio glue really to kind of Bolt two different sections of of the same song together so in in Electra for example the same song that we were talking about with the ox track um you know they just kind of used on a particular heavily affected drum sequence and then they kind of the intensity is ramped up just to give that kind of spill and that wash of effects as we move from one section of the song to another and really just kind of glues the whole thing together in a way that conventional effects would struggle to do I think so on their own the drums would sound like this they're kind of uh there's no bass drum they're heavily filtered and um they just out of this [Music] you can hear it's kind of like a distorted drum Loop um just based on kind of high hat and snare uh there's quite a fast filter kind of Envelope Filter attacking the snare to kind of give it that kind of you know kind of let that sweep downwards but if you add the space Echoes into the equation you just get you just get those little kind of fun Echoes and stuff really [Music] happen now this is too much I wouldn't have it that that loud and that's useful in and of itself but if you just want to kind of ramp up the intensity and pretend this is like a spillover [Music] situation then that's the sound you're after really and then you know you can all that kind of stuff it's just much more likely to happen if You' got the unit in front of you and you just see a control and you feel like grabbing it and playing with it um there's been a number of times in the past where just when dubbing stuff in I've just got a bit bored and start fiddling with it and the parts changed as a result so they're really um you know they're really fantastic units and they've stood the test of time for a very good reason for many good reasons actually I think if I were to go through this process again on another site I think honestly the the main the two main additions I would make one would be some kind of natural daylight I think it makes a big difference refence to uh mental health um I make a lot of Cups of Tea so I do get out of the room quite a lot anyway but um it's just it just does make it does have an effect on you I think especially if you're working as I tend to most of the time in isolation I think it's nice to have um you know some reminder of the outside world so that would be one change I would make it's obviously not an easy one to bring into an acoustically controlled environment is to have light and therefore a window letting light in and probably sound out and sound in so um I'm aware of the complications behind it and the reasons why you would take the decision not to get involved with it but at the same time um that would be one of the big changes I'd make and the other would be you know I'd love just to have have a big kind of voled ceiling really I suppose like the kind of the you know the archetypal like Barn conversion type thing um just a few more options because you can always you can always make a bigger space sound smaller but really the options for making a small space sound bigger um acoustically are pretty limited um and so you are kind of heading down the road of you know modeling rooms and kind of you know uh artificial reverbs and that kind of thing which is fine and it has actually worked really well for the new record I think but um you know it's equally it's just nice to have that kind of open environment to work in but I'm just I'm just again I'm just really grateful to be in this place to be honest and um to have much more room to be able to work to be able to invite other people here to sort of you know hang around and chat it's just nice because in the other place I couldn't fit more than one chair so um yeah this is this is a real step up for us