Matthew Herbert

I think it's safe to say that we have fully entered the era of drag-and- drop production, a time when the craft of producing music albums can be as simple as placing computer-based audio files onto a software grid. Drag-and-drop production has rendered previously required skills, like playing an instrument and engineering a recording, optional. I've seen young kids "produce" killer sounding tracks with Apple's GarageBand in ten minutes. To some, this is a positive revolution that puts the means of production in the hands of the people. To others, this is a frightening turn toward a global monoculture — a time when the music producer is merely a consumer of prefabricated chunks of corporate music.

In steps Matthew Herbert, a British musician and producer, who inhabits the highest echelons of electronic music (a genre in which drag-and-drop production is fast becoming the norm). Matthew is overtly careful about avoiding what he sees as the conformist traps of current technology, especially those found in today's music production software. He has written a set of rules for himself that, basically, require him to return to the craft of making all sounds himself. He calls this the Personal Contract for the Composition of Music (PCCOM). See the handwritten examples above right.

Certainly these mandates keep Matthew Herbert out of the drag-and- drop production scene, and they may be part of the reason why at a recent NYC club date, there were no less than seven personal video cameras hovering like hawks over the turntables while he spun vinyl into the wee hours for a packed house. These fans may have known him for his work as Rockit or Radio Boy (early DJ monikers), for his remixes of songs by Björk, R.E.M., John Cale, Yoko Ono and Perry Farrell, for his big band album recorded at Abbey Road, or his album (Plat Du Jour) made entirely of samples of food. This is no lazy man, as you will see. Matthew and I got together at Mavericks Studio in NYC and talked about making records.

You've created whole albums with what would be considered non-musical sounds — a Coke can, jumping up and down on Gap products — and yet you bring them into a musical context. I'm curious about how technology and the tools that you use affect that process. What's possible and not possible? What would you like to be possible that isn't possible?

I think a revolution really happened with the sampler. Intellectually there was never a boundary between noise and music. In the history of music and in the history of technology, that boundary has become more and more defined to the point where we think that, say, Placido Domingo or someone like him makes the most beautiful sound that anyone could possibly make, and the sound of a rusty nail on tin is the worst possible sound. Those distinctions have never really existed for me. When the sampler came along, it undermined that boundary in one fell swoop. As I started out sampling, I just went wild with this new freedom and would record the sounds of all the good things in my life. Then I realized that all the bad things made a sound, too. So I wasn't interested in the sound of a cup of tea anymore — I was interested in a cup of tea served to George Bush when he came to stay with Tony Blair. I wanted to know the stories, and I try in the process of recording to allow those stories to breathe. So, again, I don't want to just record a drummer, I want to record a drummer on a particular day, say, his birthday. I want to know how that effects his playing. Or, on one of the tracks on my new record, for example, the drums were recorded at 100 miles per hour in the back of my car. So, we're breaking the law, firstly, and secondly we're in personal danger, because we're in my 1980 BMW that has a steering issue. So, how does a drummer play differently there? It starts to inform the logic of the song. One of the songs is about death, so I recorded the drums in a hot-air balloon at 2000 feet. And again, there's some personal danger, and it's like the soul rising, and suddenly it tells a different story. So, again, the drummer plays differently. We got the most incredibly tight sound up there, too. The biggest problem, of course, were the flames filling up the balloon. But that's the story, so instead of a ride cymbal, we used the sound of the jets, so you have white noise, which is essentially the same thing as a ride cymbal — you're after some sort of high-frequency bed. I don't want to deny that we were in a hot-air balloon, but I also don't want to make it a novelty. It's there for sonic reasons, and philosophical reasons.

So recording the drums is essential to the story.

You know, drums are so boring in a way. We can hit anything in the world, so why would we hit something while ten-thousand other people are hitting something very similar? It seems a bit limiting. I don't really understand this approach where you have a kind of universal environment and you try to get what you want out of this particular environment when you have the potential to go anywhere and record. One of the tracks, again — we recorded drums in the sea, with hydrophones. And, again, you have no idea how it's going to sound, and then you end up getting the amazing wash of the stones as the sea picks them up and brushes them up against the kit.

How did you do that?

I do all my field recordings on a Nagra-V hard drive recorder, so I can just transfer it by Firewire. The A/D converters are still great, and the preamps are really good. So we just have a stereo mic to do ambient stuff. We rented wetsuits and went in the middle of winter, very cold, and walked into the sea and just dunked these hydrophones in. Half of it's completely unusable, and then after an hour and a half of recording you get something incredible. The person who made the hydrophones said he couldn't make out the sound, and as it turns out it was these shrimp with their legs scuttling around. And these are things that you would never experience in a studio, like shrimp legs.

Sampling and recording usually seem like two different things, but with your work I'm not really seeing the boundary between the two.

No. I think a sample is just a very short recording. So consequently, like on Plat Du Jour, the record I made with food, there are three to four thousand individual recordings on that. I've made a decision about each of them, and they were taken at a particular time for a particular reason. It starts to inherit the weight of these stories, and it's so easy to be original in that way. It's so confusing to me why people spend hours EQ'ing a kick drum to try to get it to sound unique or different, when actually if they took a box of corn flakes, put the microphone in the corn flakes and then put a kick pedal on it, you just get the most enormous thud, plus you get the rustle of the corn flakes. And then you get to choose your cereal. Granola is going to sound different than Fruit Loops. That tells a different story, and in the case of the food record, it tells an important story. In the studio you sort of want to give room for those kinds of things. The microphone is for listening, and I go around pointing it at things that interest me or things that I don't know about. There's a tremendous power there as well, because you can make the listener listen to anything — the price of Vietnamese coffee beans, the average lifespan of a broiler chicken in English industrial farming, Jeep Cherokee miles per gallon or whatever it is that I want to point my microphone at. I will sample the track many times in many different ways, and if I'm sampling again, the microphone will be open. If someone's doing the vacuuming next door, then it goes on the sample. I'm not trying to record that person vacuuming, but I'm not denying that story, I'm not denying that process, or denying the fact that the studio's in the house at the moment.

You said somewhere that at some point in your career, you began trying to pull yourself out of the picture more and bring the story and the sounds right to the listener. From a recording and engineering perspective, how does that happen? How do you get your own ego out of the way?

One thing that I should definitely say is that I don't think that I've managed to remove my ego from the process, even though I'd really like to do that. I don't think you can ever do that, and particularly because I'm actually a bit of a control freak. But I think that the fundamental lesson that I've learned in working with sounds is not to try and turn them into something. You've got the recording, so listen to it. It sounds like such a banal thing to say, but in just listening to it, the story comes from there. So for example, on the food record again, I was working with a food researcher, and she was telling me about commercial hatching of chickens. Basically, there are 24,000 in a room about half the size of this, and every 21 days at a certain time on the dot, 24,000 chicks hatch. In my head, I had this as some incredible moment of life. When I got there I was like, "Is that it?" Because all you hear is "bvvvvvvvvv" of these enormous fans. And then, just like that, "eeeeeeeeeeeeee", just this tone of chicks — because 24,000 chicks are all going at the same pitch, basically. And that was the story, and that's what I hadn't had in my mind. That recording process taught me philosophically about the artistic process, which was that in my head I had this very romantic idea of breaking into life, but it shouldn't be romanticized. It was quite humbling and consequently, the piece of music came out being quite sad. You have to submit yourself to the will of the sounds and see what happens. And with recording I really feel like I need to embrace those possibilities, the possibility that it's going to sound like shit. Embrace the possibility that it's not going to work and address that, and try to create a more generous environment in which that can exist.

And studios and technology are going to affect what we end up hearing.

Yeah. For example, I think software is an absolute disgrace at the moment. I think it's incredibly powerful, and I depend on it in so many different ways. But it's disgraceful really, when you think of the possibilities that electronic music and the electronic studio have offered. Software is telling you the story, and it's telling you which stories to retell. So for example, you call up Logic or you call up Reason, and it has a built-in drum machine, has a built-in acid 303 sort of thing, it has a built-in Fender Rhodes, and it's encouraging you to work in blocks in four, and it's encouraging you to record at a tempo that doesn't shift, it's encouraging you to record without distortion — all these different things, leading you down a very particular way. Sampling, for example — it's absurd that in most samplers there's no mic input.

You can't go from the room you're in directly into the sampler.

Right, which is absolute lunacy. That's what the sampler was designed to do.

It should have a great mic pre.

Yeah, exactly. And I think software is responsible for a kind of death of creativity in many ways, even though a program like Logic is incredible in what it allows you to do. And it does allow you to change tempos, and it does allow you to record not in blocks of four, but you have to come to it with those suggestions.

Is your set of rules [the PCCOM] your cure to that? Is that how you get around the limitations of the software in some ways? Is it in response to the technology?

Yeah, it's definitely in response to the technology because I was finding myself just coming into the studio, wanting to write something quickly, and I'd call up a drum machine or the worst thing — a sample CD. For me one of the lowest points in music technology was in the late '90s when Akai made a sampler that could only sample off a CD. That was the lowest point in the development of ideas in the studio and recording. So my rules were like, "Wait a minute, if I were a piano player I wouldn't think, "Okay if I just play a Supertramp intro combined with a Billy Joel chorus and a Thelonious Monk middle eight, then perfect, that's what I've got to do." And the same with guitar — you don't think, "Okay, I'll add Hendrix to Bob Dylan to what have you." So my rules aren't really necessary when you're playing an acoustic instrument, but in the studio with the technology, it's essential to take a position before you turn on any of the equipment, to know why you're there, why you're using the technology — particularly when certain things are still done better by humans. And all my rules are saying is, just don't rip anyone else off. It's not that radical of a concept. By deciding what creatively you intend to achieve with your work, and then turning on the computer, you can retain your original impulse. The premise of much of the software is at odds with the urge of the musician. Why are software samplers primarily designed to process existing files? This is a colossal distraction.

Sure, but it's still really easy to go ahead and take unoriginal sounds without thinking about it. Like, "We'll throw these drum loops up and create a song with them," and it feels original because we're creating a song.

How am I going to be original with a 909 drum machine that maybe 100,000 people are using as well? My god, you're starting a 100,000 places back down the line before you even play a note, whereas if I pick up this chair, drop it and record it, no one will ever have that. It's never existed before and it'll never exist again in that way, because the temperature is different today, there's three of us in the room — so it might change how it's recorded. Maybe this microphone is on demo and it has to go back tomorrow, or you change the cable and it's different — all these tiny little things make a difference.

It seems that in the world of electronic music there's an ongoing challenge to produce original sounds. How has that contributed to your sense of how to go about making a record that maybe isn't for a dance audience?

I think it's tough because it's gone extremely conservative extremely quickly, and I find that very depressing. It's the same affliction as in hip-hop for a while, which was a quest to sound authentic, to express your right to exist in that community by sounding similar to somebody else. And I think that really sums up where we are as a society — people are happy to submit themselves to these various authorities in order to be accepted. There's a kind of sonic fascism out there. We got denied radio play off the last Herbert record on Radio One, the main BBC show, because sonically it wouldn't have fit between Britney Spears and Green Day, or what have you. What they were saying was that there weren't enough high frequencies. The bottom end was okay, but there wasn't enough highs — the mids weren't defined enough. The amount of compression that's put on the radio is particularly disturbing. And in a microcosm, you have that fascism in dance music, so you need to have a reasonable amount of bass; it needs to be in time so the DJ can at least mix the beginning and the end of it. So, despite kind of priding itself as this forward thinking community, so much of it is desperately conservative.

Tell me about working at Abbey Road.

One thing that I did for this new record was going straight to Pro Tools at Abbey Road. Previously we had gone to tape with the big band, and it obviously had the glue and the warmth that we are familiar with, but it just didn't have the punch and it just sounded a bit lifeless, really. And this time we went to Pro Tools, and it sounded so much better, I have to say. But it was for a particular sound.

The horns are very bright and lively.

Right, and yet they're all very old valve mics, Coles ribbons and things like that. But I want to hear those, and in a way tape was a bit too forgiving — well, not forgiving, because there's nothing to forgive — but it sort of glued it all together — and I didn't necessarily need that in a modern studio where you're trying to mix that with a sample that I've turned into a keyboard pad or something like that. I've kind of eliminated synthesizers from my studio in that if I need a synthesizer, I make one. I'll sample maybe twenty times. I'll play a sound, put the mic up by the speaker, play it back, sample it again. Because I'm using Akai 612s, it's eight bit, so gradually you lose more and more definition until you're just left with a lot of overtones, and it gets much more spacey — and eventually you can just play any sound as a keyboard sound.

So it's picking up the room each time.

Yeah, it's picking up the room. It's changing each time. When you actually listen to the big band record, the food record and I'd say ninety-eight percent of the new record, everything was recorded with a microphone. For example, if I do use a soft synth to do a bass line, then I'll often put the microphone up and play through the speakers back in so you begin to get unity. That's what you're after in a song — unity of sound. It's a very easy and quick way to do that. If you're recording everything through a microphone in the same room, it starts to have that unity. The folder for this album was over a hundred gigs, so it's around a hundred and sixty hours worth of recordings. But I had made decisions about each of them at some point. I didn't just call up some preset that some Japanese developer at Korg has worked out, or what have you. And that unity starts to happen naturally because it's there, because you've structured it all from the ground up.

And tell me about your studio. Are you still in London?

I moved studios around a bit in London. The problem with studios is that the real estate is frighteningly expensive. I was constantly moving about, but recently I moved out to the country and I have a barn, so I have thousands of square feet ready for conversion. At the moment it's just set up in my living room, which is a 17th Century cow shed — a room about this size [roughly 600 square feet] that comes to a peak with zero acoustic treatment. What was amazing is that something worked. A live recording we did in there just sounds amazing. What was also interesting is that we found hollows in the floor and when we put the drum kit over those hollows, it had the most incredible bass. The kick drum sounded incredible.

Like a bass chamber, almost?

Yeah, and they weren't very big, but in different parts of the room the bass is huge. It's a seventeenth century barn, so obviously the structure's been there a while and settled. And the other thing was that we had beams across the room — Mandy the mastering engineer, she reckoned that there was one note that Dani [Siciliano, Matthew's collaborator] sang that resonated off the beam, and it was nearly impossible to EQ out.

The effects of no acoustic treatment.

Right. For example, I don't have a separate control room. It's much more spontaneous. You can just say to someone, "Do this."

What other effects have you found not having a separate control room creates?

I'll often leave the speakers on so you get some spill. And that starts to ad character to the recording. What I often like as well is when the vocal is recorded early on in the recording, the backing will change, so there's parts from the backing that are left over from the spill of the mic that don't make it into the later track. So, on a couple of pieces maybe you'll get, say, a double speed feel if you've recorded with a double- time feel. And then later you think, "You know, I want to do this a bit slower," but in the backing vocals you can hear that "tick-a-chick-a-tick."

So you're keeping remnants of the previous take. What is supposed to be playback is becoming part of the recording. Most people are trying to eliminate that.

Yeah, one of the difficulties for this record, and some of the other stuff, is that there are two environments in which I work — Abbey Road for the orchestral sessions, and my studio where I do everything else. And the Abbey Road sessions are difficult because you obviously want as much control afterwards because that's the kind of luxury we've inherited, particularly with Pro Tools being able to put down 192 tracks at the same time. But in actual fact, to get the atmosphere, to get the band or the orchestra playing together, you need it arranged acoustically in a particular way, so we end up with quite a lot of spill. What's really frustrating is that if I correct a timing mistake in trombone three or something like that, then all their ambience shifts left or right. I deliberately used that to some effect on the big band record I did. But it was quite a shocking lesson for someone like me who comes from the home studio and from building up electronic tracks. I assumed this authoritative position where you feel like you have control over everything, and like you should have control, like it's a right to have control. And, actually, that's why I like working with musicians — it's a very humbling experience, and often you have to choose between a good performance or a recording that you can have total control over.

You recently got a new board.

I had an old EMT board that was made in the '80s. EMT didn't make a lot of consoles — it was just a fairly small thing. So I got this Series 10 Harrison — it's a phenomenal beast, but the preamps are poor in it — so I've been using API stuff, which is just phenomenal.

Where do you go for mastering?

For this record, Mandy Parnell mastered. She used to work at The Exchange in London as a very highly regarded mastering engineer, and now she has gone freelance. She put her gear in the back of a camper van and brought it down to the studio. We mastered directly to Sadie from the desk. So, instead of putting down a master mix to tape, we just went from my desk into her old 1950s EMI EQs, into her converters and into the Sadie system.

So she had it all in a mobile truck?

We set it up in our living room, and basically eliminated any mix down format. We'd worked together for a while, and we got a much punchier sound than we used to get. And what was amazing as well was that we'd spend about an hour and a half doing a mix, and then because the mastering was in the same room on a separate system, we'd go and listen to it through her converters.

So you could actually hear the record?

Yeah, you could hear the record — and so if we felt the bass was too loud, we'd go around to the desk and turn it down a little bit. The vocal needs to come up? We'd turn it up a little bit. So, basically we took four days to master the record. Very slowly we hung out in the studio environment I'm familiar with, and what was really useful for her was that she could come and listen to what I was hearing. So I'd say, "This is what I'm hearing," and she'd say, "Oh, in that case..." And then she's try to make that happen in the mastering. It was like a revolution for us.

It makes so much sense.

Total sense. It's in the environment you know, so you're sure of how it's supposed to sound — she brings down a monitoring setup that she's familiar with, so she knows what she's listening to and brings her references and such.

And she brings her ears to it, in terms of getting things to broadcast levels.

Exactly. And preempting the uncertainty of what the converters are going to do — you can hear what they're doing. Amazing things would happen. By turning the bass down in the mix, for example, because of the nature of the converters, the bass came out louder in the mastering. In mastering you're often clearing up messes — maybe you over de-essed, or maybe you haven't de-essed enough, or maybe you've got the mids a bit wrong — so it's an incredible freedom.

And another chance for you to get it right in the mix. It's like mix- mastering.

Yeah. So from now on, that's the only way I'm ever going to master — just to get someone with a mobile to come in and just set up in the corner.

I imagine a lot of people wouldn't want to do it because they wouldn't want to leave their mastering room. They're designed to be so predictable.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And still, I'm usually pretty nervous when I send mixes far away for mastering.

Yeah, and I hate when things go off on CD for mastering. It confuses me. It's a bit of the electronic aspect of production. It's all mixed on a laptop, and it's got no air on it, and it's lifeless, and then dropped onto CD and sent for mastering.

Now that the digital world is here, do you have any thoughts about mastering for vinyl?

Yeah. I used to mix for vinyl, particularly for doing club tunes. I knew that vinyl would add bottom end, and would tighten it and pull it together. Often, I'd be a bit sloppier and allow the vinyl to do a bit of the tightening. Also, obviously, if you know that the track is going to be on the inside of the vinyl, you've got to be careful with the high frequencies, because it's not so good at cutting there and things like that. That's the only thing we can't do with mobile mastering yet — we can't bring a lathe down there and set that up. I'm a fan of knowing your format, but so much of that's trial and error — and in the beginning, no one really has a clue about how sound works. We all have our theories about different things, but actually when it comes down to it you just have to do what sounds right for the story.