In Issue 19 we started the tour of the new Deluxé playroom, “Sanctum Sanctorum” but hit the word limit before we managed to move on from the grand entrance, aka “The Hall Of The Six True Kings”. I also promised to tell the tale of the Dark Knight, so let’s now enter the Main Chamber and start with the Pièce de résistance of our humble studio. Well, of those pièces anyway.

It’s a replica of the harness of Sir Chevy le Noir, the infamous illegitimate son of Queen Guinevere and Sir Lance-a-lot. After a few years in exile, raised in a distant village and invited to Castle Camelot under the false identity of a Queen’s distant cousin, the boy needed to hide the fact that he was still barely a teenager, looking VERY much like a son of his parents. After endless pleas from the Queen, Merlin the Wizard created a harness, made entirely out of magically produced metal “silversteel”. This harness, to be worn in the court, would hide the features of the boy from King Arthur, and the gossiping ladies (and Knights). It was also very light weight and impregnable, the perfect suit for a trouble seeking teenager (though naturally, it had to be painted black, before the boy agreed to wear it). Unfortunately, Merlin was only half right, this Chevy and Lance found out the hard way when one fine autumn evening, they had a friendly game of lancing. Lance’s lance went through silversteel like it was barely a thin sheet of aluminum. Which in fact, it was. To make matters even worse, this fatal accident led to the discovery of the true identity of Chevy, and the furious King Arthur made sure all records about the boy were immediately erased; Chevy would be wiped out from the perfect pages of history! Thus nowadays the story is all but forgotten… yet his legacy lives on in Sanctum Sanctorum where the duplicate of the magical harness both fills the main room with a tragically romantic atmosphere, and acts as a lyrics/notes stand (when taping the papers to the chest I try not to bend the very soft metal). Female vocalists seem to get a serious performance boost from standing, and singing in front of Chevy’s majestic harness. After all it’s almost like singing to the dude himself!

Naturally, the whole Dark Knight story is entirely poppycock … but all is fair in war and studio. And luckily things are far less complicated with men; just a few moments with the official studio dog “ Mike “ and a couple of bananas is usually all that is needed for a great energetic vibe.

While the creative studio work is happening, and the musical cruiser is venturing deeper into uncharted waters of never-before-sound, someone has to stand on the bridge, acting like he knows where the ship is heading, while trying to steer it. That someone, the one NOT really doing anything tangible, is for some strange reason called “the producer”. In Sanctum Sanctorum the producer hat is worn by yours truly, usually sitting by the Command Centre in the rotating comfort of Eero Saarinen’s “Cognac” chair. Praise the mighty spirits of design: Cognac, unlike its big brother, the famous 60’s symbol “Globe” is still not being reproduced to death.

To help us to remember what is probably the only valid rule in mixing, “always pan country singers and steel guitars left as that’s the driver’s side in US cars”, we’ve marked the passenger seat speaker with cowhorns. All less important voices, and instruments go there. The blue and red object of geeky gear worship (also doubling as a monitor stand) is a mixer designed for the 1952 Helsinki Olympics by the Finnish national radio YLE. Same as the legendary EMI, once they stopped making their own gear, things started going down the drain. Fast. Btw, if anyone has a working EMI refrigerator for sale, please contact me, ASAP!

No self-respecting chamber of curiosities is complete without a collection of trophy heads and other important souvenirs from any past zany adventures around the globe. They also make great conversation pieces: “Oh THAT one … no, I don’t remember shooting that one myself, it must have been someone else from our staff”.

It’s always a matter of taste (or lack of it) where you want to put your money. If you’re a novice, or even quite an experienced audio adventurer building a studio, you might think of investing on acoustics and soundproofing, perhaps some gear like mikes and mixers, even instruments. That’s all secondary and only leads to the dark side. Start with a great kitchen, preferably with a separate mini cooker for coffee/tea/cocoa. Accept only high quality utensils. If possible, don’t put the fridge in the kitchen, as it’s better to have it next to the mixing desk, acting as a noise source. That way you can be sure your mixes survive also in the Real World ™ listening environments. Try to find an old vacuum cleaner and bolt it on the control room (the man chamber) wall to be used for the same purpose.

The Yin and Yang of the kitchen is naturally the room of refreshing meditative sessions. Yip, the bathroom. Coffee comes in, coffee comes out. Music happens in between. By far the biggest mistake most people make is that they don’t properly balance the Yin and Yang, thus the flow of energy is disturbed, sometimes even lopsided! In studio environments this can lead to abhorring things such as rock music without guitar solos, 80’s revival and even completely insane claims like “less is more.”

Only after the kitchen and the bathroom are tip top and well balanced (and you still have foolish relatives and friends willing to lend you more money), you can start working on the less crucial parts such as the control room, live rooms, echo chambers, mike closets etc. etc. We really wouldn’t (and didn’t!) worry about those, as you can always grab a portable recorder and go recording in interesting locations … so most of the stuff isn’t necessary at all. More importantly, never forget that music is a very special form of art: even if your recordings sound terrible, you can always fix things in the mix. At least as long as you do work inside a magic circle!

Uncannily many writings of ancient people worldwide tell the same story, that of decline from an original age of imagination and hope. Mysterious artifacts and sites around the world have been created with help of knowledge and culture more advanced than our current one. This ‘Golden Age’ is perhaps best captured in the legendary monument known as “’TWA Flight Center’, designed by Arch-Architect Eero Saarinen. While it’s impossible to fully understand the depth of Saarinen’s genius, leading popular experts agree on what is most likely the original source and inspiration for his seemingly unlimited creative power: his childhood home.
Eero was born, brought up and trained by his Master-Architect father Eliel, with whom he shared the same birthday, in a mystical mountain hideout called Hvitträsk. Like something straight outta ‘Lord Of The Rings’, the main Hvitträsk building is a striking example of architectural synergy. Almost every single interior detail, including art, dishes and furniture (that is often built-it), was specially designed to match the building and the surrounding landscape. Whereas great architecture is often described as ‘frozen music’, Hvitträsk, praised by the national composer Jean Sibelius, is a place of movement and transition. This unique concept was later refined to phenomenal perfection by Eero in the TWA Terminal.

In stark contrast to both Saarinen’s inspirational fireworks we have the way-too-common cookie cutter anti-design, emphasizing hellish monotony, boredom and eternal suffering, as experienced in offices, laboratories, hospitals and quite surprisingly also in temples of sound, aka ‘studios’. In his book ‘Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity’ (1995) Marc Auge uses terms “places for passing through, for forgetting, for not occupying” when defining modern airports … but he could as well be writing about the spaces where most contemporary albums are created. One cannot but wonder if this is one of the main reasons why fresh ideas in music are as common as decent generals in Burma.

Combining the Pepe cornerstone philosophies of “If it looks good, it probably sounds good” and “name first, then the rest” with a deep desire to have at least one completely new musical concept on the next album, we decided to approach the renovation of our main studio from a slightly different angle. This meant a lot of groundbreaking research and development work as at the time of writing this text “recording studio design” gives over 27000 hits on Google whereas “recording studio decoration” results in what is known as “magic number” (yip, three!!!). For example we were so sure that there would be tons of information about using puppet theaters as opto-sonical diffusers (a device that distributes waves evenly) that it took us several weeks before we gave in, stopped searching, and build a working model based on out personal preferences.
But let’s not get ahead of things! The name of our spanking new playroom is Sanctum Sanctorum. The Latin phrase means literally ‘Holy of Holies’, but in common usage can also be applied to mean any private and much-valued place. Sort of volcano hideout for the good guys. We found out that it’s also the name of Dr. Strange’s residence in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Both the buildings have many oddities, but contrary to Strange’s mansion, in Pepe HQ there would appear to be less space inside that would seem from outside!

The entrance to the studio is called The Hall Of The Six True Kings. Next to a golden door there are portraits of the following characters:

1. Elvis (the Czar of Kings) rowing a boat on a lake in Finland.
2. 3-D Godzilla (the King of Monsters) crossing the interdimensional border.
3. Carl Gustaf (the King of the Sweden), ruler of the Garden of Eden.
4. Arsene Lupin (the Patron Saint and King of Sample Users) winking an eye.
5. Conan (the King of Self Made Men) with Red Sonja.
6. Emperor Norton (the King of the Lost Kingdom of America) riding a bike.

Among the other decoration in the hall and located directly above the entrance door, there is a small framed document. It is an official declaration that James Spectrum has been awarded the Noble Title of Baron from the Royal Family of Sealand. Sealand (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand)is one of the very few countries whose name has never appeared on Amnesty International’s report of human rights violations, and yet it is not a country of sissies and spineless hippies either, no sir. In 1968 it defended itself successfully against United Kingdom, a country that was about seven million times bigger in population. The combination of these two important facts made the title impossible to refuse when it was offered earlier this year.

In the next issue I will venture to the main chamber and you will hear the eye-misting tale of the Dark Knight. Until then, stay decent!

Johann Christian Andreas Doppler (1803-1853) was an Austrian mathematician and physicist best known for research into the effects of motion on acoustic pitch, known as the ‘Doppler effect’. Doppler knew of the existence of sound waves, and he also knew that the pitch of a sound is dependent on the length of those waves. If a source is moving toward the listener, he supposed, the waves in front of the source would be squeezed together, creating a higher frequency. A sound source moving away from the listener would create a lower frequency. It is important to realize that the frequency of the sounds that the source emits does not actually change: it is the wavelength which is affected and as a consequence, the perceived frequency is also affected.

In 1845, to substantiate his theory, Doppler arranged for his colleague CHD Buys Ballot (1817-1890) to conduct what would be one of the most unusual scientific experiments in history. Ballot arranged for a locomotive to pull an open car full of trumpeters playing a single sustained note while, to the track’s side, a group of musicians with perfect pitch listened. For two days the trumpeters were towed back and forth while the listeners recorded the changing pitches of their instruments. This nerve-wrecking experiment did provide absolute confirmation of the theory, though apparently the local dairy managers noticed a serious drop in milk production and some of the cows avoided the fields adjacent to the rail line for years

While it’s neat that you can apply the principle of Doppler’s effect to several things ranging from blood flow to temperature measurement and radar to measuring the size of the universe, mankind had to wait almost a century until Mr Donald Leslie (1911-2004) came up with THE application. This invention (first one built in 1940) went by many different names including ‘Vibratone’, ‘Brittain Speaker’ and ‘Hollywood Speaker’, before settling for the final and rather obvious ‘Leslie Speaker’. A fan of church and theatre pipe organs, Leslie had become enamoured with the compact electric Hammond organ shortly after it was introduced in 1935. The small electric organ, Leslie thought, had sounded much like a theatre or church pipe organ in the vast furniture showroom where he first heard the instrument. But once he got it home he was disappointed with its sound in confined spaces. He started experimenting with devices to make the instrument sound like labyrinthine pipe organs.

Similar to many of the best inventions, Leslie Speaker operates on a simple principle. A directional sound source is rotated at constant (or variable) speed around a fixed pivot point, and this leads to three things. First, because the source is directional, the intensity of the sound will be at a maximum when it points at the listener, the sound intensity will increase as the rotating source approaches dead center, and decrease as it rotates past this point. Second, this movement will ‘shoot’ the sound all around the room you’re listening in, creating a complex modulation of the sound as it goes through the reverb and multiple reflections. Last (and the big deal) is the Doppler effect caused by the movement of the sound source.

The manifestation of Leslie’s idea comes in many flavours and sizes, but the most important ones share the same basic technology: a (tube) amplifier driving a rotating treble horn and a rotating bass speaker. The speakers have two speeds and the bass rotor has a slower response to speed changes. The art of timely speeding up and slowing down of the Leslie rotors while holding single notes and letting the Leslie provide the dramatics in rotor acceleration is often more exciting than anything synthesizer players have ever come up with. In fact the combination of Hammond organ with a Leslie Speaker was and still is so powerful, that it’s probably the only modern well-known musical tool that has never needed any advertising at all: Leslie Speakers were so popular they literally sold themselves. However, they did get free advertisement from a very unlikely source: Hammond inventor Laurens Hammond never liked the Leslie-effect and his on-going anti-Leslie propaganda actually increased interest in the speaker which improved sales! By late ‘60s Hammond-Leslie combination was recognized as the coolest and usually most expensive instrument money could buy. Instead of cows the Doppler-effected was now driving hippies to the edge of sanity… and often beyond. Not limited to psychedelic organ freak-outs only, Leslie Speakers were applied to everything ranging from vocals (‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ by The Beatles) to drums ( ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida by Iron Butterfly).

Like King Willie said on ‘Predator II’, “There’s no stoppin’ what can’t be stopped.” In 1980, seven years after Laurens Hammond had passed away the inevitable marriage finally happened: Hammond Corporation bought Electro Music, the manufacturer of Leslie Speakers and the Leslie name from CBS. Today Donald’s invention is still the undisputed Champion of musical effects, and the only thing that can seriously challenge it is two (or more) Leslies.

Hammond organ thru a ring modulator and a beat up Leslie

For the past few months I’ve been working mainly on the cover art and graphics for our videos and live visuals, and as there really haven’t been any deeper Pepe audio explorations, I decided to take some time to answer a few questions we’ve received about the album Spare Time Machine.

Q: You mention “Museum Water Power” in the CD booklet, can you tell something about it?

A: Lots of musicians and also music fans are crazy about so called “vintage” sounds. One of the main reason for this is the apparent “coldness” of digital recordings. This has created a somewhat of an industrial boom: many gear manufacturers hype their latest tube products, claiming that tubes (valves) can warm up digital sounds and make them sound like analog recordings. It’s like when you get an average pizza: add a few drops of Tabasco … and Bob’s your uncle! Same idea, same results. Works well if you’re under influence, but it just ain’t the Real Thing (TM). For that you need what chefs to as “a wonderful balance of impeccable ingredients”. After years and years of research we finally discovered what’s probably the most overlooked ingredient of any audio recording: electrical power! It’s the ether that every single recorded sound has passed thru since the demise of mechanical recorders. The main revelation to us was that most of the early rock and pops tunes were not recorded with Nuclear Power. Now some people might claim it’s just a coincidence than once we moved from regular power to local Museum Water Power, generated with turbines dating way back to 1910, our sound got nicely rounded and aged. We pity the fools. Try putting some diesel in a petrol car and see how well it runs.

Q: The name “Markus Schneider” sounds familiar to me, who is he?

A. Markus Schneider, who’s teamed up with theEnnio Morricone of computer music, Rob Hubbard, began his career by composing tunes for Commodore c64 games. When we heard that the guy had transcribed the title tune of the c64 hit “International Karate” to a full classical orchestra (performed in Leipzig in 2005), we knew we just had to work with the him! Markus was (and is) a very busy man but luckily he had enough time to do the orchestration for the final part of “Apple Thief”.

Q: What is the weirdest instrument you recorded for the album?

A: It’s really hard to pick one as there’s quite a few candidates. My friend’s father has a huge collection of Finnish toy ocarinas. We recorded a set to double whistles on “Mischief” (btw probably the most famous ocarina solo is on Troggs’ “Wild Thing”). “Ms. Wilhelmina” features ESKO-100, a huge and heavy monster of a Soviet guitar effect. Among other things it has as filter effect that make your guitar sound like a robot more depressed than Marvin of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Synth manufacturer Metasonix were kind enough to let us record the prototype of what’s probably the craziest synthesizer in the world, all-tube S-1000 Wretch Machine (low bass on “Apple Thief”). But my personal favorite is McGyver’s dandelions (on “Capt. Carter”). He’s been playing them since he was a little kid, and according to him you have to do it before the flower matures into a globe of filaments: once that happens the sound is gone.

Q: Are the lyrics of “Pussy Cat Rock” about what I think they are about?

A: You hit the nail on the head!

Q: Do you improvise or go by the book when recording instruments?

A: A bit of both. I usually plan the sessions well but then I just use my ears and improvise on the spot. I do have a few common practices like the combination of good gear and bad gear, but I strongly believe the lunch you
prepare for the musicians, the coffee/tea you brew and especially the t-shirt you wear have a much bigger impact on the final results than any tools you use. As long as they work, their type or quality is pretty unimportant … unless they are inspirational. In fact that’s probably one of the main reason I have plenty of weird gear, as plugging an organ into a modified Mr. Microphone mike-radio transmitter, and getting that signal from a futuristic orange 50′s design radio is much more fun for everyone in
the session than just going to the tape recorder directly.

Q: The best recording advice you ever got?

A: Every time you work on some important audio clips like a guitar riff, drum groove, vocal lick and you feel unsure about the quality of it, just ask yourself “Would I sample this?”. OK the session took two days to prepare, you had some wild ideas, excellent musicians and expensive gear… but if the honest answer is “No”, better just forget the recording and move on. Otherwise you’re just polishing a turd.

Q: How do you polish a turd?

A: You have to freeze it first. That’s an old producer trick… but make sure your significant other isn’t around when doing that.

James Spectrum is away due to promotional duties for Pepe Deluxe’s new album ‘Spare Time Machine’. Here are some pics of James and the band going about their Pepe Deluxe business.

Walt Disney was man who dreamed BIG. By early ‘60s he had created not just an empire but also a land bearing his own name. But he was not ready to rest on his laurels; instead he wanted a whole new world. The problems with the old one and especially its cities were (and still are) the same: pollution, feverish tempo of life, crime and general chaos. He wanted something else for his grandchildren, something that he’d experienced only in his own land. This simple thought led to an idea of almost biblical proportions: a futuristic, clean, organized, self enclosed community where everyone and everything worked smoothly. A magnificent laboratory for engineering buildings, living spaces and their relation to people. All the groundwork had been done at Disneyland, now it was time for Uncle Walt and his Imagineers to really take to another level. This was the beginning of what was marketed as ‘Disney World’, but officially titled ‘Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow’ (EPCOT).

As always, Walt’s vision was far ahead of its time. EPCOT would have ‘Peoplemover’, a transportation based on motors embedded in the track rather than in the vehicles. Main roads for cars and Disneyland-style supply trucks would travel underneath the city core to eliminate the risk of pedestrian accidents. Most of the waste would be recycled. The community would feed itself and keep the residents healthy. There would be no retirees; everyone would have a job. All the people would live in low-density, single-family house neighbourhoods with low rents, vast green areas, paths for electric cars, light recreation areas for adults and play areas for children. The housing would be designed with ease of change in mind: new ideas and products such as brand-new kitchen appliances could be added on the fly. Not bad, eh? To my ears EPCOT sounds almost like a marriage of an American dream with a communist utopian world. No wonder the minute Walt died, the Disney Corporation decided to abandon the one project above all he had wanted to leave to posterity.

Commercial success and high income allows you to develop and tune concepts that benefit the creative capital of the whole world. As no single artist can entertain everyone, I think the most important task of every artist is to inspire others to inspire others to … and that is exactly why we need something like a Rock Star driving license. If you make it to the top, better Carpe that Diem! Like when wasting money, remember it should be done with style and finesse. Consuming is– how to put it politely — god awful boring. For Pete’s sake, Italian sports cars are NOT unique or impressive… but these custom hot-rods are. No worries if you have a so called ‘creative block’: I’ve never ever heard of a person who’s really created something out of void (let’s not get into religious debate here, OK?). Creating is just another word for ‘tuning’, modifying an existing idea.

Take, for example, the Compact Cassette. An audio format introduced by Philips in 1963 and initially designed for dictation and portable use. The key design features were low quality and low price. The format should have died within a few years, but something strange and sinister happened. My guess is as good as any: some people at Sony decided it was payback for years of humiliation after WW II. So they resorted to the dark martial arts of Research and Development (R&D). What started as a format treating audio like Conan handling the members of the wicked Snake Cult, was over the years tuned to the max. The original magnetic material storing the audio was improved many times, dynamic range and frequency response were expanded and various noise reduction systems were employed to bring the background noise down. It still wasn’t nearly as good as the competition, but hey, that’s what they had the Soulless Ones (aka Marketing) for. Like mice among dinosaurs, cassette kept growing and one by one the mighty giants of reel-to-reel, eight-track, Elcaset, etc, fell over dead. This was a historical turning point: by the next big tape battle JVC’s Board of Directors had realized that R&D was pretty much unnecessary and there’s very little marketing can’t handle, as witnessed by VHS’s triumph over the technically far superior Betamax and Video 2000.

In order to do our part in keeping the audio industry ‘bad-meaning-good’ tradition alive and to properly test the famous ‘80s theory “Home Taping Is Killing Music”, we decided a few years ago it was time for us to record the whole new Pepe Deluxe album on cassettes. Now the job is done, and oh boy I can tell those fun-loving, challenge-obsessed Catskills marketing boys are just buzzing with excitement!



Last month I wrote about thermal expansion and Imperator, the first compressor to use miniature light bulbs to control the level of audio. Before I’m gonna tell you about the second generation Imperator, let’s meet another member of the electrical component family, namely LDR. That’s short for Light Dependent Resistor, also known as photoresistor, furthermore known as photocell. An LDR is a variable resistor, its value decreasing with exposure to light. The change in resistance is actually very major, dropping to about 1/100000 of the maximum resistance when very bright light is used. LDRs are used in street lamps to switch them on in the evening and off in the morning as well as in other applications such as flame, smoke and movement detectors, card readers and photographic light meters.

LDR’s are also common in vintage music gear, probably the most famous being Univox Univibe, an effect unit designed to electronically emulate the modulation effects of the rotating “Leslie” speaker.Univibe is sitting boldly on the very top of the short list of ‘Holy Grail’ guitar stomp boxes. Although Jimi Hendrix used Univibe only on a few recordings, for many people Univibe and Jimi are synonymous: a psychedelic sound that’s subtle yet instantly recognizable. Univibe uses a lamp and four LDRs to control its filters, creating a deep and very organic sweeping underwater-like tone. Much of the magic comes from the uneven sweep caused by the lamp going on quicker than it goes off. A less known fact is that Univibe has two somewhat more versatile parents: Vibra-Chorus and Resly-Tone, both featuring a tremolo setting in addition to Univibe’s vibrato and Leslie emulation. Resly-Tone is a good example that contrary to common belief, Japanese engineers can possess a sense of humour: just pronounce the name with a heavy Japanese accent! Vibra-Chorus and especially Resly-Tone are rarer than hen’s teeth, but you can hear the latter in action on the Husky Rescues superb version of Alice Cooper’s ‘Poison’. So, what’s all this gotta do with Imperator? Well, we had a compressor that produces light every time it pulls down an audio peak…so we thought why not use a few LDRs to add some extra features?! At the most basic level, every compressor makes loud sounds softer and soft sounds louder so that the music going through it has a smaller (compressed) dynamic range. The problem is, the human hearing is very frequency dependent, as proved by guys named Fletcher and Munson way back in 1930’s at Bell Labs. The ear is especially sensitive between 1 and 6 kHz. This means that if you take, for example, a drum loop and really crush it with a compressor, the cymbals, heavy on high frequencies, can end up sounding way too loud and annoying. Your million dollar beat magically transformed to kids playing drums in school music classes. Not good. So, what we needed was something to tame the cymbals while not dulling the overall sound. Borrowing the idea of lamp controlled filters from Univibe, we decided to aim at tone controls that would react to the dynamics of the audio signal. Implementation turned out to be surprisingly easy: we took the simplest textbook bass and treble filters (both consisting of one component!), and bypassed them with LDRs that were placed right next to two bulbs inside the Imperator box (providing the necessary nocturnal environment). When there was no loud audio, there was no light from the bulbs, the LDRs would pass no signal, and the filters were ‘closed’. Quieter sounds such as hi-hats were filtered. More light meant more signal bypassing the filters. By adjusting the filter component values and tweaking the Imperator driving the amplifier’s bass and treble controls, we managed to tame the hi-hats and reduce rumble, yet when snare and bass drum hits lit up the lamps, the filters ‘opened’ smoothly, bringing out the glorious full sound. The processed drums were nice and crunchy … and subjectively about three decades older than the original audio. Hear for yourself!
Two unprocessed beats followed by two Imperator Mark II beats.

LISTEN HERE

One of the most arduous, frustrating and challenging tasks known to man is opening a stuck jar lid. Unless you’re the strongman of the local circus, you do benefit greatly from the fact that steel heats much faster than glass and steel’s thermal expansion coefficient is about 40% greater than that of glass. This means that you can heat the lid (for example with hot water), and this causes the metal to expand enough to make it come off easily. The same procedure in reverse, when applied to producing strong joints between two pieces of metal is called shrink-fitting [http://www.alliedpipefreezing.co.uk/shrink-fitting.htm]. Cooling causes one piece of slightly oversize metal to contract, and it is then inserted into the other. When the cooled metal returns to the original temperature and size, it produces interference and pressure which holds the two pieces together mechanically.

The thermal expansion phenomenon is also a constant source of tricky engineering challenges. During the days of fast intercontinental flights the designers of Concorde had to take into account that the heat created by friction with air would cause the aircraft to expand 15-25 centimetres. The cabin was put on rollers in order to isolate it from the body, thus preventing the stretching from ripping the plane apart. The body was also painted with a special paint that could accommodate the changes and dissipate as much heat as possible. Rollers and gaps are also common with steel bridges. For example the Golden Gate Bridge, spanning at 1280 m between 2 towers, can expand up to 50 centimetres on a hot day. That would be enough to cause severe structural damage if the construction wouldn’t allow any variation.

Heat not only expands metals, but also affects their electrical conductivity. This effect is actually much stronger than thermal expansion: the resistance of the metal filament of 100-watt bulb increases to approximately 20-fold when it’s switched on. As a result of this, the bulb actually regulates itself when power is applied. When resistance increases as the bulb heats up, it is limiting the current going thru the filament, and this in turn reduces the heating effect and stops the bulb from burning out. Using this knowledge, some clever speaker manufacturers have actually employed miniature light bulbs, wired in series with speakers, as a simple means of speaker protection. The bulb acts like a ‘compressor’ by heating up and turning down the power spikes caused by loud peaks in music. Hi-fi purists are very offended by the potential effects of bulbs on audio quality… a reason good enough for Men-In-White-Lab-Coats, a.k.a Team Deluxé to work on, not merely another protected speaker, but the World’s first standalone compressor based on miniature bulbs!

As usual, we started with a name, finally settling for ‘Imperator’ as in ‘One compressor to rule ‘em all’ (modesty is the lowest and most uninspiring of the seven holy virtues [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_virtues]. And as usual, we had a few setbacks when working on the first prototype, basically a row of bulbs in series plus one power resistor to drop the voltage from speaker level back to signal level. With our little (read: no) knowledge of electronics we ended up burning lots of bulbs, fingers and one power amplifier channel, until we actually took some time (gasp!) to figure out all the whys and wherefores of the basic system. Armed with new hope and confidence, the basic idea was soon taken many steps further… but that’s something we will bat around next issue. In the meanwhile, here’s a short demo of the first Imperator: unprocessed drums followed by same drums going thru the whole nine lamps…

LISTEN HERE

When preparing a historical phrase, it’s usually a good idea to come up with stuff that’s intelligible to at least some extent. People might remember Philipp Reis as the silver medallist of telephone inventors had he stated something along the lines “A small sentence for man … etc.” or “I just called to say I love you”. But instead poor Phillip’s historic first telephone words were “Das Pferd frisst keinen Gurkensalat”, roughly translating as “The horse eats no cucumber salad”. On the other hand, while he might not be that famous, his immortal phrase does make him a hero of a very chosen few, naturally including the team Deluxé.

The long-ruling phone champion, Alexander Bell, has recently been disqualified on the both sides of Atlantic, and now the title ‘Mr. Telephone’ belongs to the Italian Antonio Meucci. The term telephone is based on the combination of the Greek words, ‘tele’ (‘distant’ or ‘afar’) and ‘phon’ (‘sound’ or ‘voice’). While Meucci’s invention, dating to 1857, was the first electro-magnetic phone, the very concept of telephones is very old. Before his major invention, Meucci had actually built pipe-telephones that transported sound through a pipe, a system similar to Chinese Kung-Foo Whing’s, as reported in Peking Gazette in 968.

A simpler form of acoustic phones is the classic children’s toy, the string telephone. By connecting the bottoms of two paper cups or tin cans with string, you create not only a sound-transmitting but also a wonderful sound-processing tool. Just stick a small speaker (driven by your amp) to one end of the phone and a mic to the other, and you have an effect processor that will definitely un-Phil Collinsize anything you put through it, as demonstrated by clip number 1 below.

String telephone is also known as lovers’ telephone. Those eager for curious coincidences may enjoy the fact that an essential part of phones, the microphone, is a result of refused love. A musical prodigy and an inventor David Hughes, while living in Springfield, KY, in mid 19th century, became interested in a young lady Virginia Manlove. Unfortunately Ms. Manlove’s parent decided Dave, then merely a music teacher, was not classy enough for their daughter. Dave packed his bags and moved back to his native country, England, where he soon introduced his first invention, the telegraph printer (forerunner of telex) and later on, the carbon microphone, the prototype of all the microphones in use today. Nothing fuels creativity like good old unfulfilled love!

CLICK HERE TO HEAR AN EXAMPLE OF LOVER’S TELEPHONE

Carbon mics are very cheap, very easy to find (pick almost any old phone), and they usually sound between great and marvellous. Some even better, especially if the small carbon granules inside the capsule are somehow corrupted and not moving as they should. The Icelandic band Múm came recently to Finland to record drums with our friend Samuli Kosminen who, prior to sessions, paid a visit to the Deluxé mic locker to get some tools with a serious attitude. According to Samuli they ended up using our carbon mics, especially the very unstable and distorted one that’s taken from a ‘40s telephone on all the recordings.

CLICK HERE TO HEAR AN EXAMPLE OF A CARBON MICROPHONE

Probably the main reason that practically no-one uses carbon mics nowadays is that they won’t work without external power. However, that’s not really a problem: all modern mixers and preamps feature +48 v ‘phantom power’ meant for powering capacitor mics. This works well with carbon mics too, and the only thing you need to do is soldering a special cable, which takes maybe 10 minutes. See above how to connect the wires.

A fingerprint is an impression on a surface, usually made by ink, of the curves formed by the friction ridges on the skin of a fingertip. Friction skin ridges are not unique to humans: orang-utans, chimpanzees and gorillas have them on their fingers too, and spider monkeys on the tips of their versatile tails used for climbing. It probably comes as little surprise that the general purpose of friction skin ridges is believed to be providing traction for grasping objects.

Fingerprints are the most commonly used forensic evidence worldwide. Although photography rendered law enforcement officers with extraordinary visual memories unnecessary in the mid 19th century, it wasn’t until 1892 when this infallible means of personal identification was used for the first time to solve a crime. An Argentine police officer Juan Vucetich proved Francisca Rojas guilty of a murder after showing that the bloody fingerprint found at the crime scene was hers, and could only be hers. The science of fingerprint identification still stands out among all other forensic sciences, as it outperforms DNA and all other human identification systems. No two fingerprints have ever been found alike in many billions of human and automated computer comparisons.

The term ‘sonic fingerprint’ is usually associated with great, and quite often nutty producers with distinctive signature sounds. Lee Scratch Perry, Brian Wilson and Phil Spector are probably the most famous ones, yet they’re not as groundbreaking as Les Paul, the father (the mother according to S. Hussein) of multi-tracking and the home studio. Les did come up with the second most famous guitar in the world too, but even that doesn’t make him numero uno producer in my books. Nope, that title goes to the one and only truly mad wizard, the immaculately tailored super fairy from a new world, Joe Meek. Stories about Joe’s various adventures would fill books … and they have, and I do admit having read most of them. The terms ‘innovative genius’ and ‘ahead of his time’ are often overused, but in this case they are severe underestimates. Some people claim that Joe’s work was only few years ahead of his time, but this is simply not true: while most of his tunes did eventually grow old, Joe’s productions and the fact that he crafted the tunes in a modest flat above a handbag shop preceded modern bedroom studios by almost three decades! He couldn’t sing on key if his life depended on it, yet when it came to music he was absolutely in charge: a record maker who tweaked everything from gear to artists’ hair colour in order to get another hit.

Joe Meek
While Joe Meek pioneered on many fronts of pop music, music technology and also music business, I personally find his greatest achievement to be the fact the he was the first producer to treat the whole studio as an instrument. Until then, most people had tried to capture and reproduce performances as faithfully as possible. Joe broke every rule in the book by separating and close-miking instruments, treating sounds with equipment such as a home made reverb unit made from an old heater, adding various sound effects to tunes and generally compressing and distorting everything to get as ‘hot’ a recording as possible. Apparently his composition and production ‘Telstar’ that went to No.1 in UK and USA was rejected eight times by the mastering engineers because it was always too distorted! There is a good reason why compilations of Joe’s work bear his name: it is really his recognizable sonic fingerprint, not the artists’ sound that you hear on almost every tune.

In a way Joe was also the forefather of the ‘English school of recording’ – using effects, processing and committing to sound during recording – as opposed to the American way of leaving decisions till the mixing stage. The advantage of the former approach is that you do tend to get more creative and positively surprising results, the downside being the fact that it’s rather difficult to fix the mistakes. Sometimes the mistakes are the best parts, but often you do have the feeling that if you could take just a tiny weeny step backwards, you’d turn cat gold into real gold. This is especially true with distortion: there’s a fine line between a very exiting sound and an ear-tiring sound. During the days when analog was the king there was little else you could do except to turn down the treble, equalizing the distorted sound a bit duller. But now, being armed with digital tools, there’s a clever trick you can try. Modern audio workstations have noise reduction tools based on spectral subtracting; that is tools or plug-ins, which allow you to input some signal as ‘noise fingerprint’, and then subtract that signal from the recording you want to clean. According to Merriam-Webster, distortion is “the falsified reproduction of an audio or video signal caused by change in the wave form of the original signal” and noise is “an unwanted signal or a disturbance”. What’s the difference? I don’t know …and luckily your software doesn’t know either! All you need to do is to grab some pure noise from a test CD and use that as a fingerprint. Adjust the reduction parameters to taste and clean the distortion artefacts, identified as noise by the software, away from the over-processed recordings. The results are rarely perfect, but the better the software, the more you can remove without seriously damaging the original recording. Almost like magic, only much easier to do! CLICK HERE TO HEAR A DEMONSTRATION