Richard Chappell: Recording Peter Gabriel's Up
Engineer Richard Chappell in the Writing Room at Real World Studios.

Engineer Richard Chappell has been at Peter Gabriel's Real World Studios for
over 15 years -- and he's spent seven of them working on Gabriel's latest
solo album.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Paul Tingen

Peter Gabriel fans have had to wait 10 years for a solo album proper to
follow 1992's Us. Last year, their man finally obliged with a new collection
of songs, Up, joking that "Old men take a little longer to get 'up'," and
adding, "Starting is always easy... finishing is harder." Gabriel also noted
that "Speed is not my strength: diversions are," and it should be pointed
out that he has worked on several other projects in the meantime, most
notably Ovo (2000), the music from his Millennium Dome show, and Long Walk
Home (2002), his score for the film Rabbit-proof Fence. Nevertheless, 10
years is a long time by anyone's standards.

Up's CD booklet contains some hints of the gargantuan amount of work that
went into its making, with 10 engineers and assistant engineers credited,
and half a dozen recording locations across the world mentioned. The average
amount of musicians credited per track is about 12 (counting bands and
orchestras as one), with people doing things like 'groove treatment', 'tape
scratching', 'loop manipulation,' 'Spectre programming', 'Supercollider
programming', and so on. Apart from Gabriel himself, however, only one other
person was there during entire period of the album's making: engineer
Richard Chappell, "on whose shoulders," according to Gabriel, "this record
has been built."

Chappell has worked at Real World, Gabriel's prestigious and pioneering
recording complex near Bath, since joining as a 17-year-old teaboy in 1987.
He's followed the usual route from teaboy to tape-op, assistant engineer and
engineer, being taught by the legendary David Bottrill, who was Gabriel's
regular engineer until he left in 1993 at the beginning of Gabriel's Secret
World tour. Chappell took over, working as Gabriel's live assistant, helping
prepare studio material for live performance, and engineering the studio
overdubs that were added to Secret World Live (1993). Apart from a few
diversions, as assistant engineer on New Order's Technique (1989) and
engineer on the same band's Republic (1993), Chappell has worked full-time
for Gabriel since he joined Real World. (In addition, Gabriel has another
engineer working for him, Richard Evans, who was mainly involved in the
making of Ovo and Long Walk Home)

Mountain Music

I talked to Richard Chappell in the Writing Room, also nicknamed the garden
shed, which is a glass and wooden building sheltered by trees and located a
few hundred yards from the main Real World studio complex. "Peter made the
decision for this album to get out of the production room in the main studio
building and make the Writing Room his base," Chappell explained, adding
that it offers privacy and the freedom to have the equipment set up as he
pleases. "Whenever he walks in, his mic and his keyboards are always live so
he can just sit down and play and work."

The Up album began life in the spring of 1995, when Chappell and Gabriel set
off to a place called Meribel in the French Alps, where they rented a local
chalet. "We achieved a lot there because there were no distractions,"
Chappell enthused. "We did a lot of writing, and a lot of snowboarding. It's
a dream way of working, up in the mountains every day. It was very inspiring
and made Peter very happy. We generally worked at night time, which was
tiring, because we'd be exhausted from jumping around and running around the
mountain by day."

Other than guitarist David Rhodes, who "came in at the beginning to jam
along and play," only Chappell and Gabriel were present during this initial
period. They worked for two months in Meribel, returned to Bath, took part
in a Real World recording week, kept working in the garden shed, and in
October went to Senegal for a further three months of writing. Apparently
Gabriel managed to come up with more than 70 ideas during the Senegal phase.
Afterwards it was back to Bath again, and in the Spring of 1996 they went
once more to Meribel for writing and snowboarding. ("Peter's a fun boss,
really.")

The equipment Gabriel and Chappell were using during these sessions was
brought over from Real World and included a Mackie 48-channel mixer, a
32-track Pro Tools system, a few ADATs ("for if something didn't work
properly with the hard disk"), and three Macintosh 8100 computers, one with
Pro Tools and Logic, one for backups and one for writing lyrics and going on
the Internet.

"Peter had brought most of his normal writing setup to these places,"
Chappell explained. "This includes an Akai MPC3000 or MPC60 -- he likes to
have a modular drum machine. His main sampler and keyboard controller has
been the Kurzweil for the last 10 years, initially the 2000, then the 2500,
and now the 2600. It can do a lot, and he can make interesting sounds very
easily with it. He also has a Clavia Nord Lead, and lot of Korg stuff, like
the Wavestation, 01/W, and more recently the Triton. He likes basic Korg
sounds to play with and treat, more than he likes Roland-based stuff, even
though he likes Roland pianos sometimes. He also uses an Emulator IV and the
Waveframe, although the latter less and less recently.

"His setup is quite simple really, and it's more about the treatments in the
moment. He'll work with a good piano sound, and then treat it with effects
like Eventide or Delta Lab delays, or distortion or other pedals. He has a
lot of guitar pedals to play with. We use Pro Tools plug-ins, but in general
it's more a matter of putting stuff through speakers or a pedal. But it
could be anything. It's not that calculated. It's whatever works."

During the Summer of 1997 the duo made another trip, this time to the
Amazon, where they recorded on a friend's boat. "It was a small trip of
perhaps two weeks or so," Chappell explained. "It was a private boat with a
full recording studio on it, but I can't talk about it, other than to say
that we worked on Logic there as well. It's just a crazy thing that we do
now and then. It was a strange and bizarre trip in which we were travelling
down the river working on music and looking out of the windows seeing the
rainforest go by."

Back In The Real World

In the Writing Room, further writing, recording, overdubbing, and editing
was undertaken with the help of a digital Sony R3 Oxford recording console
which was installed in the Summer of 1997. "When we moved to the Writing
Room we just had a Mackie setup here and a whole bunch of gear and a big
mess of cables," recalled Chappell. "After the second Meribel trip we bought
the console and installed a proper studio here, with Neil Grant Boxer 3
speakers, and currently Mackie HR824 nearfields. We have two Sony Oxfords
now, one here and one in the workroom in the main studio. It has 120 faders,
which is just about enough for what we do!"

After the different writing periods Gabriel had, with his 'sprawling' way of
working, come up with about 130 song ideas and sketches. A selection of
these would find their way on Ovo, Long Walk Home and Up, after going
through many different permutations, variations and approaches, with people
being invited in to try different treatments and musicians asked to overdub
all manner of parts. The joke has been made that Up is the first recording
that needed its own archaeology department to organise, store and retrieve
all these bits of information. It was therefore not surprising to hear
Chappell state that hard disk recording as well as the digital Sony desk
were essential to the project. With hard disk recording Chappell was able to
name and organise unfinished ideas and parts, while the combination with the
Sony made it possible to switch instantly from one song idea to another,
offering Gabriel unparalleled creative freedom and spontaneity.

"Looking back, I don't think we would have been able to do it with more
traditional studio gear," Chappell remarked. "With Peter's way of working
there's simply no other way of doing it. It does get quite crazy, because he
doesn't like to throw many things away, so you build up a huge archive of
tracks and tracks and tracks. I had various assistants on the project and
one of their main jobs was to listen to things and make notes of what's
happening and highlight the different bits. These highlights then ended up
on DAT tapes so we could go back and listen to them. Then they got
transferred to iTunes, the Macintosh's MP3 player, and so Peter always had a
point of reference."

Nevertheless, with Ovo and Up being Gabriel's first largely self-produced
recordings, one wonders whether he and Richard Chappell didn't at times feel
overwhelmed and find it hard to remain objective. It appears that the
versatility of digital technology again proved essential. "We didn't get
overwhelmed because the music we were working on was always changing. The
canvas in front of us was always changing... it was always fun, and always
interesting, and I really like the music. And Peter is very amicable and fun
to be with. So it was refreshing more than overwhelming. I never got worried
about it."

The Truth About Analogue

Gabriel and Chappell were, however, worried about another aspect of digital
technology: sonic integrity. In 1995, when work on Up began, hard disk
recording was in many ways still in its infancy, and many were fearful of
losing data and concerned that 16-bit audio coming from a hard drive sounded
inferior to tape. Chappell said "I tend to agree that the 16-bit/44.1k
resolution is too low, but at the time we decided to work with what we had.
We A/B'ed things and then it was like 'That's it, let's get on with it.
Don't be distracted by that.'

"We A/B'ed a lot of A-D converters. We had used Apogees for the final stereo
transfer to DAT of Us. Since then we did more A/B tests and got a bunch of
Prism converters to record any fundamentally important things, like vocals.
We immediately heard the difference between the Prisms and the Pro Tools A-D
converters. One of the reasons for going for the Sony Oxford desk was the
quality of its A-D converters. In the end we simply used the Sony
converters. Our only problem now is to figure out where we're going next,
because the Sony doesn't support more than 48kHz, and I've listened to 96k
and it sounds better. But then, the Sony sounds better than a lot of 96k
desks that are around at the moment.

"When we began the project there was no 24-bit recording. We did eventually
transfer everything to 24-bit/48k and kept it at that. Sometimes we couldn't
get enough tracks out of Pro Tools for multi-channel sessions with drums or
musicians, so they were initially recorded to the Sony 3348HR [48-channel
digital multitrack] or the Studer A820 [24-channel analogue]. We used the
latter mostly for treatments. We often work in analogue for treatments and
used the Studer as a processor, kind of like an off-line plug-in. We take
things out of Pro Tools, put them on the Studer, mess with varispeed, up an
octave, down an octave, reverse things and so on. There's a real quality
that you get from analogue that's beautiful and nice. It's not an arty way
of talking about it, it's the truth.

"We also do treatments in the Sony console. I'll have a reverb available
like his standard Quantec, a set of delays and quite a few plug-ins,
whatever is needed. But as a rule I print any treatment or effect, so when
you get something that's really happening, it is recorded, rather than
having to go back and having to set up again. The same with a plug-in that's
working."

Original Audio

The Writing Room boasts a 32-channel Neve 33-series desk, but its 33797
modules are "basically used as mic amps," according to Chappell, and it also
features a wide range of other preamps and microphones. For Gabriel's voice,
Chappell often used a Sony C800 valve mic in combination with a Shure SM58,
run through external mic amps like the Amek or Neve. "It depends on the time
or the song, there are lots of different ways really. I may sometimes use
the digital compressor/limiter on the Sony when recording his vocal, but a
lot of times I'll take it off and just ride the level with a fader."

Gabriel's love of guitar stomp pedals and analogue sonic treatments are
other examples of old-tech -- as is, arguably, his most recent talent,
playing the guitar. "Yes, Peter plays guitar now!" stressed Chappell, "and
yes there are particular ways in which he works, sometimes with sampling,
sometimes with manipulation. He doesn't play it normally, let's say. But he
has fun doing it, and he likes to record a lot of it, and then he likes to
go back and find out what happened."

'More Than This' is one of the tracks that came out of Gabriel's unorthodox
guitar experiments (see box), as is 'No Way Out', on which he is credited as
playing Telecaster. On these and other tracks Gabriel also receives some
colourful credits such as Wonky Nord, Mutator, Oxford Backwards Samples,
Firefly Keys and so on. Some, like MPC Groove or Sample Keys, are
self-explanatory, but others demand an explanation. Chappell elaborated:

"Peter likes to credit things in a particular way if it has been useful to
the song. The Mutator is a filter box, and the Jam Man a small Lexicon delay
box. You record into it and loop it and it layers and delays. It distorts
really nicely and it's great fun for making instant loops that you can play
with. Firefly Keys is simply Peter's way of describing a sound on that
track. I think it may have been a patch from Gigasampler, a PC-based sampler
that's great for instant sounds. If you want a string section or something,
it's there immediately. It loads very quickly. Since the time we did Passion
we also have a sample library for the Akai S3200, but we don't really use
the Akai that much any more."

Chappell's credits on Up extend beyond general engineering to individual
mentions for programming on all tracks and 'treated loop' on 'The Barry
Williams Show' and 'loop manipulation' on 'My Head Sounds Like That'. Most
of his programming centres on rhythms, reflecting his origins as a drummer.

"It's basic stuff really," Chappell explained, "because you're engineering
you're adding sounds, you're programming stuff, you're moving things around.
It's normal in engineering now. This is why my credit for programming on
'The Drop' [a piano/vocal solo for Gabriel] pissed me off. I just recorded
it and manipulated some stuff around. That's all. With regards to the other
stuff, now and again we get people in to program, but most of the time I'm
left to my own devices, and then I just program. I generally take audio
samples and move them around or touch them up.

"We normally have a rule that we only use audio that originated from us, so
no sample CDs. We have a lot of drum sessions that we go back to and get
parts from, and then it's a matter of trying to get it to sound different.

Sometimes I may get some MPC happening, but most of the time I like to cut
up audio in Logic. On Ovo we had a programmer called BT [aka Brian Transeau,
interviewed in SOS December 2001], who did some programming on the tracks
'Make Tomorrow' and 'The Tower That Ate People'. I was quite inspired by
him. He does everything in audio, and since working with him I've copied
that. So we do all the loops in Logic, stretch it a bit, cut it up, play
with it, see what happens."

Mixing Up

Another juxtaposition of the hi-tech and the old-tech came in with the
American engineer, producer and mixer Tchad Blake, who mixed the album.
Blake is particularly known for his work with 'dummy' binaural heads (in his
case the Neumann KU100), and his strong preference for compression and what
he calls 'mechanical effects', sticking microphones in rubber tubes, tin
cans, or cardboard boxes rather than using digital reverbs (see SOS December
1997). Blake decamped from Los Angeles to the Cotswolds in recent years and
now mixes and records frequently for Gabriel's Real World label, often using
his binaural head. Blake himself was reluctant to talk about his work on Up,
but Chappell was prepared to lift the veil a little. "I think Peter invited
Tchad because he was producing himself and wanted to have a fresh pair of
ears towards the end of the project to keep things under control. Tchad is
very strong-willed and having someone like him around is a good discipline.
We tried out a few songs with him, and Peter liked the results, so we kept
going. Tchad is a genius with what he can do sonically. We also have a
history with him here at Real World, so that's what we went for."

There was, however, one complication, and it fell to Richard Chappell to
sort it out. Blake didn't want to mix on the Sony, nor did he want to mix
straight from hard disk. So he set up in the large recording room in
RealWorld, where there's a G-series SSL, and Chappell transferred all the
disparate bits and pieces that made up the ingredients for each track onto a
Sony 3348HR and Studer A820.

"Tchad wanted to work off tape and completely in analogue -- although in the
end he did mix from hard disk. Tchad likes to work in the big room because
he has a lot of equipment and wants to spread it around. He likes the Sony
Oxford desk, but he often inserts a lot of analogue gear everywhere in the
signal path. You can do this with the Oxford, but you get sample delays. You
can adjust these, but it was just too much hassle for Tchad to deal with.
He's very instant and likes to quickly buss things in and out and get on
with it. He could also use his binaural head techniques more easily in the
big room. The strings on 'Signal To Noise', for instance, were recorded
quite dry, so he decided to spin them through a room and bring them back in
via the binaural head.

"With Tchad mixing in a separate room it meant that Peter and I could keep
working. Peter would be in here recording things with me for the same song
that Tchad was mixing, and we'd walk towards the main building to add these
things to the mix. Tchad would either agree or disagree, and they'd have to
figure out between them what was going to be used."

Tchad Blake's mixing process and Gabriel's enthusiasm for last-minute
overdubs meant that the various ingredients of many songs ended up in even
more different places than before, making Chappell's job of compiling the
material still harder. When I talked to him, he was in the middle of
collecting the recorded ingredients of the song 'Growing Up' into one file,
so it could be sent off to the American pop mixer Tom Lord-Alge for a single
mix: "Even with all our notes it's still a pain in the neck to turn
everything into one document. I'm looking through different versions and
trying to turn it into one version. A lot of songs were worked on over such
a long period of time, and things were added in SADiE, in Pro Tools, in
Logic, in the cut. It simply takes a while to figure out what happened."

Chappell is also preparing material for producer Stephen Hague, who is
working on a revamped version of Ovo, with Gabriel singing all the songs,
which is to be released later this year in the US as a genuine Gabriel solo
record. A remix album, which will see people like Tricky and Trent Reznor
having a go at various tracks from Up, is also expected in the shops towards
the end of the year. On top of all this, after the European and second
American legs of the Growing Up tour in the spring and summer, Chappell and
Gabriel intend to complete the follow-up to Up, tentatively titled I/O and
based on material from the same sessions as Up. It is scheduled to be out
some time in 2004. It seems like an extraordinary avalanche of releases from
the master of non-record-proliferation: "Sometimes you wait ages for a bus,
and none come, and then suddenly four come along," is Gabriel's explanation.
With a possible six albums out in the period 2000-04 he may risk having a
congestion charge slapped onto him...

UP Track-by-track

Darkness

According to Gabriel, this was originally entitled 'House In The Woods' and
remains a track about "fear and how fear inhibits people". The track has
reportedly inhibited quite a few people from listening to the rest of the
album, such is the shock of the gentle tuned percussion right at the
beginning being abruptly interrupted by monolithic distorted riffing and
vocals. One wonders why Gabriel decided to put this right at the beginning.

"Peter has been asked that question quite a lot," Richard Chappell
commented. "We played with the running order a lot, and we always kept
coming back to this track as the first track. It is one of the first tracks
that we finished, and it was one of the easiest we worked on, to get it
right. It just has so much muscle and it seemed like a fun idea to have the
quiet intro and then the loud assault. Some people have actually broken
their hi-fi because of it. A few people became quite upset during the
discussions about the running order, but Peter wanted to come back and show
some strength. I really respect that.

"The quiet pulsey sound right at the beginning is a triggered keyboard
sound. It's a gated treatment that's running along triggered by a groove,
and then we cut it in and out and laid it at the front of the track. The
aggressive, loud noise that comes in is actually a conga going through a
distortion box. It's all drums and percussion, although there's a guitar
underneath it as well. We used the Jam Man for the distortion, and there are
a lot of percussion loops on that track created with percussionist Mahut
Dominique. The distortion on Peter's vocal is a combination of the Sansamp
and a Line 6 plug-in. It wasn't added in the mix, we always had the vocal
like that."

Growing Up

Chappell: "The elephant-like sound is a vocal treated by the Jam Man. This
is the only track that has a sample from a library -- a cello coming from a
normal Akai library. What sounds like DJ scratching is in fact Tchad. He put
a bunch of drum fills onto a tape machine, hit go on the tape machine and
spun stuff in."

Sky Blue

Gabriel: "The oldest track on the record. The original riff is probably 15
years old but it was something that I always liked and felt had good emotion
in it. As a teenager I was very influenced by soul and blues and it was my
starting point for a lot of music. I think this was definitely an influence
on that track."

No Way Out

Gabriel: "That is something that emerged from the early sessions and there
was this sort of Latiny feeling to the groove, but that's pretty much buried
now. In fact some of my favorite rhythm programming was on this track by
Chris Hughes and a thing called Supercollider [a Mac freeware soft synth].
It breaks everything up into lots of little pieces and then reassembles
them, still very granulated. It has this strange mysterious percussive
quality to it. I was thinking a little more Roy Orbison when I was doing
some of the singing and I think there is that influence as well as the
computer-mangled ethnic rhythm element."

I Grieve

Chappell: "The way that track ended up was very much Stephen [Hague]. The
way we'd worked on it, it was very dark, even on the 'up' section. There's
one loop that remains from that, the drum loop that comes in and out.
Stephen worked with a programmer called Chuck Norman and they got the rhythm
track to happen the way it does. We did a mix of this track for the movie
City Of Angels a couple of years before, and Stephen heard it and wanted to
have another go at it. So we let him and it ended up on the album."

The Barry Williams Show

Chappell: "The treated loop I did on this came out of the 3/4 drum tracks
that we had put down -- as we did for every track -- and me going, 'right,
what can we do to make it different and right?' So I took some Manu [Katche]
parts and looped them up and started to treat them with some samplers and
put them back on hard disk. I think you can just play with things and see
what happens."

My Head Sounds Like That

Gabriel: "Some chords in there are very old, but the mood was something I
liked. And then there was this moment in Africa when one of the echo
machines jammed and started malfunctioning and I liked the sound of that,
and so the loop that begins the track is actually from this Delta Lab Echo
which was crapping out at the time."

More Than This

Gabriel: "This came right at the end from a thing I started with guitar
samples. I was mucking around with guitars and Daniel Lanois had left his
beautiful Telecaster. I can't play guitar to save my life, but I can make
noises on it. The first sound that you hear on this track is me manipulating
my guitar samples on the keyboard. I'd always liked it, and I was driving
through the Italian Alps and found this old cassette which had this stuff
and I'd been playing around with a different groove, and it started to make
sense to me at that point."

Signal To Noise

Chappell: "The Oxford backward samples on this... Peter likes to have
treatments come back again through the Oxford and use the EQs on the
console, which are pretty dynamic. So he'll take his keyboard track and a
drum track through the EQ and do some passes of the whole song running an EQ
filter across it."

Glossary

© 2002 Sound On Sound Limited.