"My theory is the reason that so many bass players are producers is we all get tired of how bad our bass ends up sounding on records and we decide to do something about it," says Melvin Gibbs, echoing sentiments I've heard from dozens of bassists, from low to high profile. "It's a disaster. I used to get depressed when I first started. I'd go into one session, before I owned any equipment, and the bass sounds amazing. Next day, the same bass sounds horrible. And you're kinda like, 'What?!'"
"There's a standard frequency range that people expect the bass to take up, when they see an electric bass. If you try to explain, 'Well, actually I'm hearing it more like a Moog,' and you want a different frequency curve, you can try to explain that to them. They won't get it. I've never seen the kind of things that happen with guitar. A guy comes in with a big heavy metal guitar, it sounds like a heavy metal guitar. But a guy comes in with a reggae bass sound — imagine turning that into Jason Newsted or some shit? People feel the need to conform the sound to what they think it's supposed to be, as opposed to what they're actually hearing."
"But I think there are other options to how the bass should sound. I like to hear a really thick sound — I don't necessarily like to always have the bass sit exactly in thefrequency range that is the traditional frequency range. If you listen to the records that everybody thinks sound good, the way they use bass is different than the way the bass is getting used now. They used a lot more of the low end of the bass, a lot less of the mid — I like to hear that quality in the bass. But I also like the bass to cut, so it's almost like some heavy metal guitar sound kind of thing. I don't like to hear as much mid in the thing, because I want to hear more volume — you know what I mean?"
In response, he prescribes attentive listening and flexible thinking to engineers, "A lot of the time I used to do sessions, the bass is not being cut live anyway. So why does it have to be the 1176 [compressor]? Why can't you try something different that's going to give you a different, and/or better sound? I remember this one record I did with Arto [Lindsay] that probably has one of the best bass sounds I have. We went in there and he set up in the studio — he plugged me into the 1176, and I said, 'Well, why are we using that?' He said, 'Why not?' He had a Summit sitting there. I said, 'Why don't we try going through that, see what that sounds like?' And the bass sounded amazing."
Naturally, for bassists, awareness of sound and frequency are key, but perhaps less so for flexibility. Gibbs suggests determining exactly what kind of sound you want to produce on bass and establishing your own rules for reproducing that. "I learned you have to be like the Nashville guys. They have a rack of shit they roll in, they say 'See this thing? Plug it into your input. [laughs] All your bullshit, don't, no...' The closer you can get to that the better off you are."
Currently, Gibbs favors the simplicity of his Tobias basses and Avalon U5 DI, with which "it's hard for them to ruin the sound. No matter how hard they try to make it sound like what they think it's supposed to sound like, it still sounds like it's supposed to sound... I love the way the bass sounds just recorded direct to Pro Tools, because the bass sounds really tight, really punchy — it has a lot of power to it. I love the way the Avalon sounds, so I always make sure I bring my Avalon. I try to listen to all the compressors and I try to use the one that gives the fattest sound, if it's my session. If it's a kinda pop thing, a kinda radio thing or whatever, of course you're going to let them do the standard 1176, with the traditional settings that everyone has in their minds for what the bass is supposed to sound like."
One of Gibbs' favorite places to record bass is Bill Laswell's studio, where among other projects, he tracked DJ Logic's first CD, Project Logic. He remembers: "That was my Avalon DI into Laswell's RCA compressor, to tape, period. Oh and I had the Waldorf filter at the time, and the bass sounds killing. No other extra bullshit."
Back in the Rollins band days, however, things were more complicated. On the second album, Come in and Burn, Gibbs tested the engineer's patience with an unusual and complicated setup: "I was using two amps and I had the sub, and I had it routed so that it was two signal chains — one that was always to the sub with two distortions, and one that was through the wah, and that would go to the high side. It was distorted too, but you'd have this kinda like frequency thing, this combing — but in headphones, it sounds like panning because of the way the frequencies work... The producer came in and was like, 'What?' I said, 'There's a method to my madness. I have this thing set up this way for a particular reason.' And he kind of didn't get it — at first, [he and the engineer] were really skeptical, until I got everything set up correctly, and then they got it, and the record sounds great, all the pieces of the bass sound."
Interestingly for a jazz/funk instrumentalist like Gibbs, he doesn't see Rollins' '90s line-up as experimentally conceptual, á la PIL's Album, which pitted punks, jazzbos, metal-shredders and world- beaters in an 'unusual suspects' scenario. "It'sfunny, 'cause, I always heard [Rollins'] band as a funk band. I always heard the funk aspect of what they did. And also, when I heard them, too, I was kinda like, 'Wow, listen to this bass player, he plays like me.' You know he played with the distortion and all the things that I was doing anyway. I actually liked the music a lot before there was any idea... I love working with Rollins."
Furthermore, he felt his biggest contribution to the band was to push things in a simpler rock direction. "My whole thing with them was, if they could just figure out how to take one of these 12 minute songs and make it into a 3 1/2 minute song, the thing would go to a whole other level. So that's one of the things that I kind of wanted... Not like 'Hey you guys have got to write shorter songs,' but just think about the way they use their forms. Because coming from doing the stuff that I do, with [Ronald Shannon Jackson]'s band, you used to have to do that all the time. With Shannon, you'd be on the road and the song would turn into a 15-minute song, and you'd come home and make the record and the song would have to be four minutes long. With him, we all had to learn to condense our ideas down, to sound bite size, so that was something that I felt that I brought."
Though he's engineered in large studios, his production style of late pretty much defines the terms "DIY" and "on-the-fly." Though he has a small recording set up in his Williamsburg loft apartment, it is by no means a studio. "Well, the guitar amps go in the bathroom. If I do any percussion stuff, I do it in the big room. Vocals get done in the kid's room."
The main space is a sharply live room, with a tile floor and giant glass windows. There's hardly any treatment for monitoring, which Gibbs feels isn't much of a liability. "As far as mixing in here, you have to take into account (and with tracking, especially) vocals — I have to be careful with that, obviously. I have to pay close attention because it's so live, to how much room gets up on the tracks. But when you're tracking stuff, an eccentric room is a very necessary thing, as a matter of fact... You go to all these places where they tracked all these records that really sound great. You go to Sun, you go to where they tracked the Motown records, you go to Rudy Van Gelder's — you get this perplexed look about... 'Oh, it's just a ROOM!'"
Gibbs uses Dunleavy speakers since the biggest year he had with Rollins, when, as he puts it, "I had like, [laughs] way too much money... I don't know. I bought them a while ago, so I don't know how the pricing is. But when I bought them, they were called 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, and each number stood for how many thousands of dollars they cost. I got the number from the guy in the mastering studio, of this audiophile place in Jersey. And the only one's I really liked were the 1s and the 5s, and really just in terms of space, the 5s are this big [hands about three feet apart], so I really would have needed another room just for the system. So I just got the 1s. And that thing that the Oxygen is on, that's a sub. The power amp is some audiophile thing — the cables, some of them are Monster, some of them are ridiculously expensive cables. I decided to go that way because talking to a lot of the old engineers — the old records, everything was referenced to quality. The NS-10 thing kinda became a thing in the '70s. But I just liked the way the older records sounded, so I decided to go with the audiophile thing instead of the NS- 10/Crown thing. At some point I'll have to get some NS- 10s. The problem with these speakers is that they are reference speakers. A lot of music that you enjoy listening to [laughs] is not so enjoyable on those speakers."
"I have access to an Avalon compressor pre — it's at Arto's house right now — we kinda share it. On the other side of it, I have two Really Nice Compressors — I guess they're like 180 bucks now. They're amazing. You'd never believe they're that cheap — they sound really good. If I'm doing bass or guitar, I'll borrow a 421 from somebody, or I have a couple of Coles, but I don't tend to use them in the house because they're very room oriented, and because the room is so quirky, it might not work as well — and the Coles are so delicate you can't really put them close to the amps."
Gibbs has an old version of Logic on an even older 266 MHz Mac G3, with a FireWire card that he uses as his recording machine, as well as a Yamaha O3D board. He's tentatively discussing upgrading everything at some point, but proceeds for now on the "ain't broke, don't fix it" principle. Any plug-ins or processing he leaves for a bigger studio mix session or his iBook, where he favors Ableton Live for edits, loops, and remixes. "I'll track the stuff in Logic that really needs to be in there, vocals and all the stuff that needs to be kind of high fidelity, and all the grungier stuff, I'll do it in Live just 'cause it's easier."
He's recorded and mixed material here for his own band, Liberation Theology, as well as for Harriet Tubman, a collaborative trio with Brandon Ross and JT Lewis, Pete Cosey, Antibalas' singer Amayo, and a gypsy group, Tarif de Haidouks, and most often, former DNA no-waver and avant-pop songwriter Arto Lindsay. Gibbs began producing Lindsay's albums after playing with Lindsay's Ambitious Lovers in the early '90s. "Arto likes to start with a blank slate. I tried to get him out of that this time, but we always start blank — there's no demos. It's a record from when we start. And you know, you might hit a couple of dead ends that way, but that's the way he likes to work, so it's worked out for him." Lindsay's latest, Salt, began in Bahia, Brazil, recording "everything in Reason, real modular." Says Gibbs, "I went down there with three pieces. I have the iBook, the Mbox, and a little rack with Planet Phatt in it, this old E-mu rack-mounted box that was a very popular module. You can hear the sounds on Timbaland's stuff..."
"The order of business with Arto is just discussing with him — the kinda like, other style of producing, you know? There's so many different ways to do the job of producer. And working with Arto is a kind of combination of a couple of different ways of doing it, because it's kind of like working with rock groups in the sense that you have to discuss the concept of what you're doing. You have to think about the overall idea of the record, which is what the really great old school guys do, the ones who aren't engineers themselves. Their genius is like, 'Okay. Why are you doing this? What does this song mean? Why is this song so long?' So in the beginning with Arto, it's what kinds of things he's thinking about, and what he wants to accomplish finishing the record. So we spent a while discussing that, and we kind of arrange the ideas and he might say, 'I want to do this, this. This song's going to be about that.' We'll discuss the elements, you know, how much of it he wants to be programmed, how much of it is live, and then when we do that, I'll start. I'll go through the programs I already have, or I'll make some, according to what things he wants to have. We spent a lot of time in Bahia, in Brazil. A lot of their music is based on a combination of what they call 'samba reggae.' He wanted to have a kind of New York reference to that, so he wanted some dancehall beats, which is what I'm into right now, so I started amassing some beats that I thought would fit with that music."
"We did a lot of the recording in Rio. So I ended up taking the Mbox and iBook down there and doing a lot of the record in the iBook, and dumping that into the other producer's studio, into their Pro Tools, doing a lot of stuff through ReWire, using Reason as the drums, and ReWire-ing into Pro Tools." The rest was done shuttling between Gibbs' loft and Lindsay's Manhattan apartment on Lindsay's Pro Tools rig.
That Gibbs straddles the divide between player and programmer as well as jazzist, rocker and hip- hopper is not really idiosyncratic. I recently ran across Gibbs' writing in Greg Tate's book Everything But the Burden, a collection of essays on the topic of cultural appropriations, specifically that of white from black — a fascinating read, important for anyone involved in popular culture. In consideration of this venue, it made me want to ask him for his take on this from a technological perspective.
Our point of departure was hip-hop collagist Steinski, who in the late '80s entered and won a DJ competition with what was essentially a finished piece, presenting something to this musical framework that was technologically completely different than was really idiomatic, whereas now, hip-hop is all done with computers. Gibbs reacts thoughtfully, "It's interesting. My friend, Sasha Frere- Jones, he's writing this whole book about how technology dictates the direction that music goes in. I always have this conversation with people. People always think of the MPC as being the musical instrument of the ghetto or whatever, but actually, the instrument of the ghetto is electric piano. There was a time when you could go in any bar in the deep ghetto of America and if you didn't see an organ in there, it was going to be electric piano in there. There was not going to be an MPC in there." [laughs]
"It becomes the question of what is the music of the ghetto? What is being represented as the music of a culture, as opposed to what is the actual music of the culture, and how do these do things interact?" This divides into two avenues of discussion technologically, one being what is idiomatic to a musical culture, and the other, how the culture can draw from other areas and maintain its character?
"Essentially, you have what kind of technology is available to people. What's available to them is how they're going to make their music. If that's what you have, then that's the sound you're gonna make. I was in Sam Ash and somebody was telling me, 'You can't make hip-hop with Reason!' You can't make the hip-hop we're making now, but Reason costs 250 dollars! Somebody's gonna make some hip-hop with Reason. It's going to happen." It's just a question of when the musical technology and the culture meet.
Jumping back to an earlier example, Gibbs sees this meeting as fundamental to the very origin of hip-hop, the meeting of technology and culture mirroring the meeting of distinct cultures themselves. As an example of the former, I adduce that the practice of mixing and scratching records on turntables arose from people having block parties and plugging into wherever they could plug in, whether it was out somebody's window, or by jacking into the municipal power grid through a loose streetlamp cover.
Melvin takes off, "I always tell people, it really took three things to make hip-hop. I get in arguments with people because I say it had to be in New York... Because you had these three different cultures that came together, and three different ways of looking at how music is supposed to be performed. You got the Southern blacks, you had the Puerto Ricans, and you had the Jamaicans. The Southern blacks had the music, the Puerto Ricans had the way of dancing, and Jamaicans... The thing I think about, when I think about turntablism is, the real drastic effect that the Jamaicans had on putting the technological ingredients together."
"Because the NY style of mixing, obviously there was already DJs and mixing, but the dance style of mixing — you put a record on, and you put two records together, and you keep it going, and you take a good piece of this record, and you connect it to a good piece of that record. Now the Jamaican thing was always, 'Take the good part of the record, repeat it.' That idea, taking the good part of the record and repeating it with the little funk break, or as opposed to like, 'Yah my selector!' Taking the Southern black music and putting the Jamaican style on it was the major ingredient of what became hip-hop. And then it became a question of, 'What kind of beats could people dance to?' And that's the type of thing that Puerto Ricans had the influence on. The whole breakdancing and all of that."
Though tape splicing had existed well before, the starkly juxtaposed structures enabled by cut-and- paste editing didn't really kick up to full steam on hip-hop until the digital age. Still, it's specious to think of the juxtapositions made possible by the nonlinear editing of digital media, because from this perspective, collage was already happening on multiple levels, from social to electrical.
"Everybody always talks about Kool Herc, but since I'm from Brooklyn, we used to go see DJ Hollywood — he was the one that everybody knew. But all of these guys, there's no document. Grandmaster Flash was the first one that had a document, maybe Jam Master Jay. I don't know who recorded first, but there's a whole generation of those guys who just exist in the minds of the people who were there." [laughs]
After the mainly procedural issues of technology arise the more complex and politicized interrelation of marketing and demographics. Gibbs frames the development of pop culture in this area as a mad cultural goose chase that brings to mind Dr. Seuss' Sneetches: "Everybody's chasing each other around," he says. "Ten years ago I had a record label, and it died essentially because the distributor died and took a whole bunch of our money — declared bankruptcy, and killed the label, but in those days, the early days of what's now called 'alternative hip-hop,' and we did pretty well in that scene. In those days it was very rare to see a white person at a gig, on what's called the 'underground hip-hop scene.' Now you go to what's called the 'underground hip-hop scene' and it'll be [laughs] pretty rare to see a black person there. And now the big joke of the year is all the white kids are trying to have hip- hop bands and all the black kids are having rock bands. Things change... The flip side of that is the whole resurgence of black rock now. I had a band that I was producing back then and I did some meetings, I had some people cold tell me, 'This can't sell.' I had major people tell me that. I was like, 'I sure wish I had a tape recorder right now, I could probably get a lawsuit out of this.' But the music never died, you know what I mean? The context changed, and now you've got Andre 3000. Atlanta was the one place where people never really stopped playing that kind of music."
