Back in May, I interviewed Moby and Sigur Ros producer/ engineer Ken Thomas, who discussed his technically uncomplicated and often unconventional approach to music production and getting the best out of artists. I interpreted his methods as an objection to more modern recording techniques and technology – mistakenly, as it turned out – and asked Thomas if he considered himself to be a purist. His nonchalant response was to suggest that he may be slightly so, in some senses, but “certainly not to the extent that someone such as Steve Levine is”. Thomas was quite adamant that he embraces technology and will use any tools at his disposal if they help him get the most out of a recording.

Defying expectations
Fast forward to July and I was lucky enough to be presented with an opportunity to interview the MPG chairman and a celebrated producer himself, Steve Levine. On arriving at his home studio in West London, the words of Thomas were ringing in my head and I’d already developed an expectation of finding a room filled with expensive analog outboard gear and not a plugin or digital processor in sight. Conversely, I was surprised to find a comprehensive and balanced mix of both analog and digital, which immediately prompted me to relay Thomas’ comments to Levine.

Levine’s response began with an introduction to how he works: “Here’s an interesting thing that I’ve recently discovered. This company, Chord, makes guitar cables and it approached me and asked me if I’d like to try some of them out. I’m always a stickler for the quality of the cables I use, because I’ve learnt that they make a huge difference – not just the quality of the cable itself, but proper screening and so on. It’s also critical to use the right cable for the right job; if I want a speaker cable, I’ll use a proper speaker cable, rather than just a standard guitar or mic cable. If I want a digital cable, then depending on whether it’s for AES of SPDIF or whatever, I’ve got the right cable for the right job, because it does make a big difference. If I’m plugging into my desk for the phantom power, that will be a proper old-style GPO brass cable because that’s really important, to have a brass plug.

A cable revelation
“So Chord sent me these guitar cables and the band I’m working with at the moment, Patch Willliam, had a Strat. We plugged it in and the result was a revelation. Strats are notoriously difficult because of the loading, particularly when you have a few pedals and so on, but the reaction in this case was: ‘Wow, that sounds really bright.’ It was as if we’d got 20 per cent more top end out of the thing. So I asked Chord to make me some mic cables, which it did and I’m using them now.

“In terms of purity, all my mains power comes directly in here – and this is always something that many studios overlook. Although this is a home recording environment, I have a 30-A supply coming in from the street, totally separate to the house. And I have both 110 and 240-Volt in this room because I have a lot of American friends and I also have a lot of legacy American equipment.

I can plug anything in anywhere and not have to worry about a transformer or anything. Everything in this room is stabilised, including the air conditioning, so, for example, at the moment it’s really humid so we need the air con on.

“Now, if you heard that little ‘bink’ sound a couple of seconds ago, I have to confess that’s because, when the air con switches on, rather than me getting a massive spike on my audio, a Furman power conditioner stabilises the mains. The noise is because I had to get to get behind the blanking panel to change something and I haven’t put the screws back in tightly, so when the transformer does its job it flexes the panel slightly. It’s not an issue, I just need to tighten it up, but what I’m saying is that I’d rather have that acoustic noise, which is just the panel, rather than a spike that I can’t get rid of.

Pure sound
“When I say I’m a purist, I want the signal to be as good as it can be without anything getting in the way. I don’t want to record mains hum; I don’t want to record unnecessary hiss. However, if I decide to plug it through a valve compressor, or a valve front end or valve microphone, I’m quite happy with the noise that it would inherently have. I just don’t want any more of anything – anything that shouldn’t be there.

“When people talk about analog recording, I guess 99 per cent of what they like is the reaction of the electronics of the tape machine, the reaction of the tape somewhat saturating. What they probably don’t want are dropouts and tape hiss. But these positive factors can be achieved quite easily digitally and, should I want to do that – and I occasionally do – I can. The plugins for this desk, the Yamaha dm2000, are phenomenal. In the desk itself, from the day it was designed, is a whole separate board of processing power that these plugins work on. But this one [Levine points to his computer screen, on which sits the graphic interface of a tape emulator plugin] is fantastic, you can change it from an American machine – an Ampex machine, clearly – to a Studer machine from the 70s or from the 80s. And what is really great about it, is that you can over-record it, apply overbias and put it on ‘not-so-good’ tape. Now I know the graphics aren’t that great, but sonically it does actually add some of those effects, which is really good.

“This is just why I have the Focusrite Liquid Channel, which once again can add some of those things. Now it may not be mathematically accurate, but when I’m going for a sound and the artist is sitting with me and they say: ‘we want it a bit more this’ or ‘a bit more that’, you have to pull out a few things quickly and that happens often. Some of the compressor models on this do impart something to the signal and whether it sounds exactly how it is supposed to, I don’t really care to be honest, it makes it good and the artist likes it and that’s the important thing. Particularly with vocals – if you create a sound in their headphones that the vocalist really likes hearing back, they can sing better, because it’s like you’re super-enhancing what they’re doing and they love it. The [sE Electronics] Gemini mic creates a feeling of wellbeing, it absolutely does. And once the signal is in there, it’s in there.

“I’m not a snob about analog or digital, it’s just that when I changed over to digital, the advantages it gave me far outweighed sonic nuances. While I’m a purist, absolutely, I think creativity is really important. So for me, around 1982 to 83, I think analog recording got really good. That was probably about the peak, when we were running 48-track, two-inch machines. Studers and MCIs were mainly the machines I used – Studer maybe being slightly better – but generally speaking, those two lots of machines gave you a pretty good level of control. However, the massive disadvantages were that – particularly at that time when I was working with Culture Club – the backing vocals were multi, multi, multi-tracked up and you’d still have to bounce them down and the quality would go down a little bit.

Of course, they had a brass section in there and, particularly as there were lots of stabs, you could hear the print-through, no matter how you recorded it.
“You’d work on track one and then a month later you’d get the tape out and work on another track and there’d be print-through all over the tape. So those things kind of annoyed me and also George was constantly changing his mind. I’m a whiz when it comes to tape editing; I was taught by Mike Ross from a classical point of view and I’ve had to edit from classical sessions with scissors, so I am pretty good at analog editing. However, it is still a major task – to take two-inch tape and cut it is sweaty armpit stuff.

Creative choices
“Digital offered an amazing array of choices from the beginning. First of all, even in the earlier stages of using the Sony 3324 tape machine, number one, I could do a clone of the tape. Initially I only had one machine, but if I wanted a clone, Sony would do one for me. Soon after that I had a second machine. So I still did slices on the original tape, but I’d already backed it up, so therefore if I made a mistake, I could go back to the copy. And once I had the two machines and the two remotes, then I could edit electronically, which was just unbelievably creative.

It wasn’t as good as it is now with a hard disk system, but it was bloody close. Then you could multi-track your backing vocals, you could bounce them down and put them on to copy tracks with no loss of quality, no brass print-through. So while we know that that 16-bit, 44/48K systems and its converters aren’t as good as what we have now, the creative process was fantastic, nevertheless, and I think we made a better record creativity-wise by having those digital tools, rather than being saddled some of the problems we had with analog.