With seventeen gold and platinum records to his credit, Adam Fuest's eclectic discography reads like some sort of schizoid iPod run amok. The London- born-and-raised Fuest has worked with a variety of artists over the years, such as Mott the Hoople (engineering for the band at the age of 17), King Sunny Adé, Queen Latifah, Salt-n-Pepa, Big Audio Dynamite and The Cure. Over the years he's been a member of bands such as Hard Rain and Blancmange, acted as chief engineer for three seminal London studios — Orange, Livingston and Beethoven Street — and also served time as Vangelis' personal engineer in the early '80s. A fellow proponent of the "open room" style of recording (working without a traditional, isolated control room), Adam and I met on the Open Room panel at the 2007 TapeOpCon in Tucson. We hit it off and found we had a lot in common. In the late '90s he and his wife, author and music-biz veteran Adele Nozedar, left urban London and moved to the Welsh countryside. They opened Twin Peaks Studio, situated between two huge lake-like reservoirs in the national parklands of Torpantau and nestled in an astoundingly beautiful horseshoe-shaped ridge of mountains. They've since been hosting a steady slew of artists from all over the world. Some recent projects of note include engineering Babyshambles' sprawling 2005 debut album Down In Albion, Simon Falconer's latest and Tara Busch's new release.
Obviously you cut your teeth on 2" tape. Lately you've avoided the Pro Tools route and have been working exclusively with a system called Soundscape [by Sydec Audio Engineering]. Tell me about it.
Not many people in the U.S. really know about this system apart from the film industry. Basically you have a box with X number of inputs and outputs, and they can be utilized in any way whatsoever. For instance, I created a virtual mixer, which is all of my inputs. I've got my monitoring and my foldbacks all running from it. Everything is running from here. Anything can be routed to anything. I can take an auxiliary and route it to an ASIO stream internal bus or direct to an output that can go to any piece of audio gear. No latency. I can insert pieces of gear from the outside world into it without any delays.
When you say no latency...
No latency! Well, there may be a micro click or two in there, but I work with great musicians and none of them have ever felt it!
How do you get around that?
A massive amount of processing. Soundscape has huge DSP cards and these never have any problems. You can insert plug-ins or create any kind of construct, channel or module that you want. If you simply want to use it as an audio recorder, just arm the tracks and hit go. Reliability-wise, it's very similar to [iZ Technology] RADAR.
That's cool. How many times has it crashed on you in the past three years?
It's never crashed. The computer has crashed and Soundscape has been recording; I've rebooted and Soundscape is still recording. All of the hardware is external.
The computer is just a controller?
If you have a power blip and it freaks out it'll do an auto save before it quits the program. Those all depend on host stability, not the software or the hardware. I've taken it up mountains and run it from little generators. It's just those two boxes. Mine is quite a big Soundscape system. It's 48-tracks.
Working on the Babyshambles' first album sounded like an adventure in decibels as well as lifestyle.
You've seen the size of the place. [laughs] In the end we had an [Ampeg] SVT-2 in a booth and opened the windows. Two 4x12 [guitar cabinets] and a [Marshall] JCM 200 werecranked up full in the other booth.
The live room is basically fifteen by twenty feet?
It's twenty by eighteen and these were out during the session [points to sliding glass doors between control room and live room]. I can't wait to get them out because I'm so used to them not being in. Although, having the sliding glass doors was handy.
Did they do live vocals?
Yeah. Mainly through the [Beyerdynamic] M 88. The rejection on that is not good, to be honest. It's not bad, but it sounds better than a [Shure SM]58. That's what the band did most of the vocals on. It was something that Pete [Doherty] could handle without it fucking up, and he handled everything excessively. [laughs]
I think his lifestyle has been well documented.
It has. As long as they keep laughing, I think it's all right. It's when they stop laughing that I think you've got to worry. Microphone-wise we had a lot up. On drums we had a [Shure] Beta 56 on the snare, a shotgun mic on the snare from ten feet up, a Groove Tubes GT33 and a [Neumann] KM84 on the high-hat. Toms were all Sennheisers.
Two mics on the high-hat?
One was quite far back and one quite close.
Do you do that a lot?
No, not often. That was something that Bill Price [the other engineer on the session] wanted to do. I was like, "Okay, let's do it." One was to the side [of the high-hat] and one was up above.
It was you and Bill engineering?
And Mick Jones [The Clash] producing. It worked very well. There were some strong relationships — I had worked with Mick on a lot of the Big Audio Dynamite stuff and Bill had done The Libertines albums [and The Clash]. There was also my knowledge of the place and lack of fear about working in such an open way. The whole thing worked very well. But they [Mick and Bill] were pretty insistent on having 2" tape at the beginning.
Were you going to hire something?
Yeah, we were all set up to bring in a 2" machine. I said, "Don't bring it in. Try out Soundscape and see if you like it." It was just when Quantegy had gone down. There was no tape. People who found themselves mid- project were paying a thousand pounds for a reel.
You could have had that on your hands.
We were going to repeatedly record and dump everything back into digital as the days went on. We were going to need thirty rolls of 2" tape. Basically any time the band was in the studio, we would be recording — whether they were skinning up or whatever. You can't do that with tape. On the drums we were running PZMs as overheads and [Groove Tube] GT 44s as a crossed pair in front of the kit, quite high at about seven feet. The kick drum was a [AKG] D112 and a [Yamaha] NS10.
You have no shortage of [Yamaha] NS10s [monitors] lying around.
There are carcasses everywhere. Putting the monitors on kick drums is the best use for them, really. [laughs] That basically covered the kit. We had a [Neumann] U87 and [Electro-Voice] RE20 on the guitar. For the bass it was an [Audio-Technica] AT 4033, an [Electro- Voice] RE20 and a DI.
The DI probably came in handy for mixing, with all the bleed.
No, I don't think so. I know it took five weeks to mix, but it all sounded pretty much the same as when it left here. I know they [the band, Mick and Bill] went into several places to record more and they didn't get it. It was all about "the window of opportunity." The band would plan to start, but there would really only be about a half an hour of creativity in their day.
Because of the "distractions".
Because of the "distractions" and girlfriends.
Was Kate Moss here?
Yeah. Seeing her high kick around the live room with a glass of champagne in her hand was entertaining. [laughing] She's got legs like matchsticks. Because of the sheer volume [level] that they were working at everything was run on the big UREI [813 speakers]. The Mackie [HR824s] couldn't be heard at all. I put 18" subs on the bottom and went two-way with the UREIs and they sounded great. I'm going to take out the bottom of the soffit and I'm going to drop the eighteens in there permanently.
You're going to turn your control room area into a sound stage.
Yeah, I like that. I used to work for Phil Manzanera at Gallery Studios. He had a PA and a pair of [Yamaha]NS10s. [Roxy Music's] Avalon was recorded there. Of course, it helped that Bob Clearmountain mixed it.
Elsewhere.
I don't think Bob would have come out and mixed on a Trident 80B console with one [Roland RE-201] Space Echo, a Fairchild and two Drawmer gates. [laughs]
You could do worse.
I mixed a hit record once and all I had was a noise gate and a [Roland] 301 Space Echo. It was a single mix for De La Soul and Queen Latifah. It was done in a night.
No compression needed?
The studio was so awful I didn't need compression.
Self-compressing studio — that sounds great!
I remember the A&R man saying to me, "This record sounds terrible!" A month later it was a hit. [laughs] It's a terrible '80s hip-hop track, "Mama Gave Birth to the Soul Children."
I see you've got tons of TL Audio stuff in your racks.
They make good gear. It works. I don't understand why they don't sell a lot more in the States.
[pointing to piece of gear] What is that?
That's an LA Audio Classic Compressor. I bought that in the late '70s, early '80s. It's a diamond piece of gear. If you ever see one of those, buy it straight away. It beats the shit out of an [UA] 1176 — absolutely. Two channels are available, unlike the [UA] 1178 where they're ganged together. It's fantastic for double compression as well as chain compression.
Internally, or do you have to jump it?
You have to jump it outside. Like a pair of 1176s. It's a great combination.
Different settings on each to get the best of both worlds.
Exactly. It's the bulletproof vocal, isn't it? You can get that with the MD flat, no EQ — perfect.
The MD is the...?
The MD2. I've got an early Groove Tube MD2 [condenser mic], which is my favorite for vocals. It's a bit noisy. It hums. I've got to cut off everything below 45 Hz to get rid of that. I don't care. It sounds great. I use a pop shield. Sometimes I use a pencil, which is cool.
Let's hear about the pencil trick.
The pencil trick is wicked. Get a chinagraph [pencil] and shave off the bottom half flat so you can push it against the body of the mic. Tape it to the body of the mic right in front of the diaphragm. It breaks the impact of the wind to the center of the diaphragm. Here's a nice trick that we started with Vangelis [and Jon Anderson]. When we were mixing Short Stories we had an [AKG] BX20. They're cool sounding spring reverbs — twin chamber but they're a little bit noisy. Are you familiar with those old dbx noise reduction units that were used for tape machines? We put a pair on the input and a pair on the output.
That did the trick?
Yeah, it did the trick. From that I came up with the idea of wanting to take stuff that had lots of high end and use plates and springs but not get the clatter, so I started putting de-essers on the inputs. I have these old dbx 363s down here that are absolutely perfect for that. So I have them on the input to any reverb. I am then able to crank the highs on the reverb. Then I have this expansive, high reverb but it never splashes. I'm taking out all those high-end transients. It's also great for drums. If you want to tame a reverb — particularly a plate with drums in it — put a de-esser on it and then you aren't going to get those cymbals trashing the fuck out of the plate.
Do you use pitch-shifting tools or anything like that?
No, I did for a little while. I had an outboard Antares [Auto-Tune]. I didn't like using it. Sometimes you've got to, but I literally do it on a single word. If I know that they're not going to sing it any better, then it has to be done. It's got to be about doing the best that somebody can do that day.
Right, because there's not an infinite amount of time.
Everybody is going to walk away from it after six months and say they can make a better record. This is the only one they're going to make at this time.
That's why it's called a record.
Exactly. You're capturing a moment in time and space. That's what my job is. It's a unique event. It can go awry when people start trying to change the truth of that event in time and space, which you can't do. It's not real after that point, is it? Or, maybe that's the magic that we're supposed to employ — the illusion. Being conjurers.
