JAMES SPECTRUM GETS TECHNICAL
Beatmag’s regular technical columnist James Spectrum (AKA Jari Salo of Pepe Deluxe) reveals the arcane art of the ‘sonic fingerprint’…
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.
