Damian Taylor Interview

Where did your interest in music and production all start?

Well the interest in music came a long way before production - my folks said they used to put me to sleep to Wagner shortly after I popped out of the womb. These days I wish I could say I was put to sleep by Arvo Part and Bela Bartok... that would have given me a bit more street cred!

In terms of production though it was probably in two stages. Firstly before I had any concept of what a studio was I would get totally tripped out and sucked in by some of the mad sounding pop records that were on the radio in the mid to late eighties, which for me was roughly from age 6 to 12. My family also moved from Canada to New Zealand in 1987 and I distinctly remember feeling how different tracks felt in such different environments. As time went on I'd really be influenced into (or away from) liking something because of its sonics, though it wasn't such a conscious process.  

The second stage and probably the more direct answer to your question is that when I was 15 or 16 or so I got my hands on an old Fostex cassette four-track. I had been playing bass in some grunge bands at school (yes, this was in 1993) and got sick of the guitarists' taste so I was pretty ecstatic to discover I could totally control all the parts going into the music with this crazy technology. Unfortunately I couldn't play, sing, or write for shit at the time so the music kinda sucked, but after another year or so I had saved up for a used Alesis Quadraverb, a crappy guitar and drum kit, and I spent about a year making tripped out noises through that, turning the tape backwards, all that good stuff.... my life has been all about making records from then on. 

Following on from the passion, how did you take the next step to doing more serious recording and production work?

I found out about a part time audio engineering "degree" which I signed up for and did while still living in New Zealand. The most crucial thing happened while I was at Bungalow Bill's music store on Symonds' St in Auckland, staring at a display case full of effects pedals. I overheard that the proprietor (Bill!) also ran a studio. I shyly told him I was "studying to become a record producer" or something like that, and he took pity on me and gave me the number of one of the main engineers who was working at his place - The Lab. Luckily the engineer, Chris Van Der Geer, was a very generous guy who let me come in and sit in the corner during a few sessions. Just seeing people making a record really positively impacted on my course and on the little two hour sessions in the learning studios. I can't thank those two enough for letting me sit in and even ask the occasional question (I think my first question was to ask why the meters on some bits of gear moved to the left, while some moved to the right!)

The most significant next step after that was moving to London. My parents are both British so I was lucky to inherit the passport, and I can't tell you how exciting it was to come to the UK after being stuck on the other side of the world, getting music press 3 or 4 months after it had been written, then sometimes spending months trying to get my hands on a record I had read about that sounded good! It's hard to imagine that now that we have this lovely old interwebnet thing.... anyways to cut a long story short, everything happened for me in London - most significantly it's where I met the key people who believed in me and mentored me, and to this day if I ever get asked for advice by someone who wants to get into production that they should find out where the majority of their favourite records are being made and just move there.

Before working as Bjork’s main producer you were based in London as an engineer.  Who were some of the more interesting artists you worked with and what were the main skills you learned?

Well the first and most important part of this answer is to clarify that Björk is unequivocally her own main producer; I just help her out however I can. It would probably be a lot more accurate to say I'm her main engineer/programmer, though the exact nature of my duties varies a lot from day to day depending on what's going on. Some days I just make killer tea!

Getting back to the main point, and echoing the question above, London was amazing and it's really where everything came into proper focus for me. I think I could fill up half the internet with all the skills I learned - and developed - but I think referencing the producers and other engineers I worked with could give you the most juice: Guy Sigsworth taught me how to hear and achieve "perfection" in the studio and above all how to really really really focus on and enhance a vocal. Also Guy was so generous with his almost bottomless knowledge and passion for music of all eras and genres, so our dinner breaks were probably better than any university lecture I could have ever attended. 

With UNKLE it was the exact opposite but in a good way! I learned about what I'd now call vibe over method - we had a really exciting couple of years together searching and experimenting and taking the weeks' tweaks down to Fabric where they had a residency. Above all James Lavelle was just totally driven by his gut and would just react emotionally to whatever he heard coming out of the speakers. It became an interesting game to try to put a smile on his face. Rich File was the other half of UNKLE at the time, he was such a great character and very musical, I really miss being in the studio with him to this day.

I did a lot of editing and programming for Neil McLellan (who later brought me in to work with him and Liam Howlett on The Prodigy) and the way he treated the Neve in Strongroom 1 as a musical instrument completely blew my mind and fundamentally changed my approach. The way he mixed was just lovely - you'd almost never hear him just precisely sweeping an EQ up or down to find a frequency, he'd just jam out for a couple of mix passes making bass sounds go "wickiwickiWAAAP", head bobbing like mad, mouth doing all the shapes of the sound he was crafting, and he'd develop this totally organic, living breathing relationship with the frequencies in the music as a result. Few things in the world are better than being with Neil in a huge-ass room at the early stages of a mix, he'd be dubbing everything out left right and centre - I really should have had a DAT running all the time! But Neil was brilliant too because he knew how to switch mental gears, he could go from that total instinct and vibe to being methodical and precise.

There are so many people I wish I could mention (artists too!) but my biggest frustration in London was that I didn't get to work with Jim Abiss more than I did - just three projects. I was with Jim on a couple of mixes (South's first album, then part of Kasabian's debut) and his ears are totally magical, he's also got completely his own way of interacting with gear. I got to engineer just one session for him where we recorded a band, and his way with people was even more magical, he's probably the most empowering and inclusive person I've ever worked with. He had every talent and ability to be able to tell people what they should be doing, what would make a track better, but really his gift is in guiding a band to find those choices themselves - you'll get a far more unique result if you empower the artist to be themselves. I got to mix an album for Jim too - I think my ears improved double just by absorbing the few tweaks he'd come and do hands-on himself.

Oh shit - did I mention how bloody interesting The Prodigy are? Liam is the absolute total don, such a joy to be able to help out the times I have with him. I could go on all day....

And you have spent the last few years in the studio and on the road.  Tell us a bit about the writing process with Bjork.

Right, Björk, now SHE is interesting. She made her first album the year I was born! Even after working with her for years I'm completely unable to quantify anything she does, except to say that she really really knows how to protect and nurture her instinct. This is something I totally respect and don't want to mess up so for most of her writing process I just try to be useful when she needs something, and transparent when she doesn't. 

On Biophilia I thought it could be useful to give her some fun tools to play with in the writing process, so I spent a vast amount of time learning MAX/MSP and designing some performance systems with Lemurs and video game controllers as interfaces - half the songs on that album were written using them in the end, but that's another story for another day. As a bit of a tangent I have to say MAX/MSP is totally amazing and well well well worth the time and effort to learn.

 

With the most recent tour you have a brass section with the full band, how did you and the musicians decide what needs to be performed for the live show – break the whole song down and build it up again?

Well again Björk's music is really Björk's music - for the Volta tour she assembled a group of people that she felt would create a certain dynamic which resonated with where she was at at the time, then chose the repertoire that she felt would suit that dynamic. She worked with Matt Robertson who transcribed all the songs into brass versions, so before the first rehearsal she had ensured the arrangements felt right to her. Matt then spent a lot of time working with the brass section, rehearsing, and often extensively reworking parts to suit the players. Björk and Jónas (keyboard player) have been friends for years and I believe they had quite a bit of back and forth about what he'd bring in, then it was a case of seeing what Mark Bell would do with beats and how that would combine with Chris Corsano's playing. Some songs just needed a pretty direct reference to the recorded version - if the mood or emotion Björk wanted to convey was very precise - while others were turned on their head. From my end I focused on the musical electronics (as opposed to beats) and really I just tried to find out what else was going on with everyone else then just fill in what was needed. At the end of the day though, Björk would go and stand with Kevin Pruce who mixes front of house, and she'd direct and finesse what we were doing until it felt right to her, while also leaving us a lot of freedom to be pretty spontaneous on the night.

You are just about to complete the building of your new studio which looks amazing so far in the photos.  What gear are you going to have in there that are your absolute favourites?

Yeah the new studio in Montreal is pretty amazing - we've called it Golden Ratio. The goal in there was to get the monitoring accuracy and confidence you feel in a top flight studio, but with a totally different vibe and ergonomic layout. 

I wish I could say I have an enormous collection of vintage outboard and microphones but that's not the case just yet. After spending a lot of time making music in "guerrilla" situations (i.e. not in a purpose built studio) I'm really focusing my energy and funds on the unseen things that make a studio great - I'm going way over the top with Mogami digital cabling throughout, tie-lines everywhere, great patchbays and ergonomics, but above all it's all about amazing acoustics and the fundamentals of the room itself. It's been designed from the ground up and the main room is accurate down to 21.6 Hz! It sounds f**king phenomenal in here!

Getting back to specifics on the gear front though, I'm absolutely loving my Mac Pro running Pro Tools 9 and Ableton Live, and I've got a whole bunch of Apogee and Mytek converters on the computer which really make working in digital land a joy. I have to say all the new Waves stuff is totally killer, Sound Toys plugs have put a huge smile on my face, and I'm a worshipful fan of the DMG EQuality equaliser - at that price absolutely everyone should own one! Don't worry though, I'm not trapped in the box, I've just bought an old "mini" Ward Beck console - they're Canadian made so you don't really hear about them in the UK but they're amazingly overbuilt consoles in the old style with super high quality class-A circuitry. Mine has 12 channels and weighs over 100 pounds! I've got a couple of nice old bits of outboard like Urei LA3As, a Tubetech LCA2B, an H3000, K&H UE400 EQ etc etc... but a number of years back decided that I'd only add in analogue outboard if I made it myself! I wanted to understand what was on the inside of everything and how that affected things. So far I've built a few versions of the classic LA2A compressor, a couple of 175b circuits, a couple of blue-stripe 1176s, a heavily modded version of the SSL mixbus compressor, a bunch of awesome mic pres, and a deliriously amazingly transparent passive relay switching monitor controller. Building all this stuff is an amazing balancing factor to all the digital things I do, and it's nice to feel a connection with the old old old school of engineering where you'd have to build the studio first before you could record!

Oh and I'll be pulling out my Korg MS-20 and Roland Space Echo - definitely a couple of desert island pieces.

 

On Bjork’s albums, and other albums you have worked on, there are always very creative synth sounds used, what are your favourite synths at the moment, be they virtual synths or hardware?

Oops better look above - I'm very much married to my MS-20! I've got a thing for old monosynths - the Wasp is my other fave, it always sounds like it's about to blow up! Recently I've been developing a bit of an interest in late analogue polysynths, I scored a mint JX-8P with the PG800 controller recently, and I'm kinda jonesing for a Juno-60. On the virtual front I haven't made quite so many friends, in general my brain thinks much more in an audio/recording/sampling/editing mode than in a MIDI/Synth mode, but I have found myself coming back to Ableton's Operator  and Native's FM8 a lot. I'm also really into software samplers, Kontakt and Structure are both great, the Ableton Samplers are nothing less than genius, and I also really like the Morgana sampler for a whole different flavour. I have to mention Mark Bell though, he is totally from another planet when it comes to synths; no doubt many of the sounds you're referencing on Björk's stuff would have come from him. He has blown my mind into many small pieces on many occasions, his grey cells and mine are wired completely differently and it's inspiring seeing him get tweaky. Actually on that front, he introduced me to a lot of the more abstract Reaktor patches out there, so it's another goal for Native Instruments! 

Amongst the other bands you have worked with is Prodigy, what was that like to work with Liam to create a finished album?

Oh brilliant, I get to talk more about Liam! Simply put, it's just wonderful. He's a total and absolute original, and he's got the instinct, attitude, and ability to pull that stuff off. Very clever man indeed, but not clever with it - does that make sense? One of the things I love most about Liam's approach is that he's very clear-cut - something is either working or it isn't, it's in or it's out - it's either The Prodigy or it's not. I remember the first time I tried to do a gentle fade-in over a few bars, he was just like "Damian, what the F*CK are you doing? Get rid of it!!"  Definitely NOT The Prodigy. Liam's got incredible attention to detail yet he's able to make music that is so totally in your face and raw, he's obsessed with kick drums and low end, but he's got this incredible musicality but in a mad subversive way. He's a total genius and an absolutely wonderful human being to boot, I really hope I get invited in at some point to work on another record in the future.

More geek talk: it’s always important for the producer to stay inspired – which pieces of gear do you turn on to get you turned on?

Ahhhhhh now this is the total nitty gritty! I think that in my case I've noticed inspiration starts to flag when I feel myself slipping into patterns. I love Pro Tools to pieces and can rework the fabric of time and space in there, but around 2003 I just went and spent a year in Logic - deliberately to frustrate all the channels in the brain I had spent so long building up. It was a really interesting process and I developed a whole bunch of new methods and new ways of hearing which I now incorporate back in Pro Tools.

When Ableton Live came out it was another opportunity to rewire my brain in a fundamental way. I love how they've been able to make this incredibly streamlined and simple tool which encourages you to dive in, then there's layers of complexity waiting to be discovered. I love how I can fully produce a track from start to finish in there, or take Ableton down to Boston Bar in Reykjavik and play a cheeky drunken DJ set to a pack of vikings with it - Live really is brilliant.

At one point I had spent a couple of years travelling almost nonstop and working on a laptop - I produced Adam Freeland's remix of Sarah Vaughan's "Fever" 100% on my G4 Powerbook at that time and it got nominated for a Grammy! - but when the chance came to set up in a room again the first thing I did was get physical things again - analogue synths, a little valve mixer, guitar amps, pedals and microphones - once again just to encourage different channels of the brain to open up.

Sometimes if I'm not feeling fired up I'll become a total gear geek just try to get something or anything new in the mix. Getting in something fresh that you don't know how to use can encourage you to be more naive and playful - you don't have the filters in your mind telling you what's right and wrong. On the opposite extreme redefining your relationship with something you already think you know inside out can be wonderful -  one of the best revelations I had was opening the Pro Tools manual for the first time EVER a couple of years ago and starting reading at page one! It was a pretty amazing way to find out about all kinds of little tweaks and features that had been invisible to me, then beginning using them refreshed my approach from top to bottom.

 If I had to pick one thing that consistently works for inspiration, it's switching off whatever I'm working on and trawling for new music. Sometimes it can be really hard to find something that fires you up, but I think music is at its most exciting when you feel other people are out there pushing the envelope, and that you've got to dig deep to keep up.

Lastly, nothing beats experience – what would you say has been the most important skill that you have picked up over the years?

Check your phase :-)  

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You can visit Damian's website at www.damiantaylor.com.