Tom Elmhirst with Mark Ronson celebrating
| Artist | label | title | credit |
| Adele | XL | Chasing Pavements | MIX |
| Cold Shoulder | |||
| Melt My Heart To Stone | |||
| MAROON 5 & MARY J BLIGE/RONSON REMIX | Wake up call | Mix | |
| The Kills | Domino | FORTHCOMING ALBUM | Mix |
| BOB DYLAN | SONY BMG (US) | Most Likely | Mix |
| MAPS | MUTE | You Don't Know Her Name | Mix |
| SIA | IE | Pictures | Mix |
| Lily Allen | Capitol | Smile (US Version) | Mix |
| Mark Ronson | Allido | VERSION | Mix* |
| NYPC | Modular | Fantastic Playroom | Mix |
| Kano | 679 | LONDON TOWN | Mix |
| Roisin Murphy | EMI | OVERPOWERED | Mix |
| Amy Winehouse | Island | Back to Black | Mix |
| Amy Winehouse | Island | Rehab | Mix |
| Moby | Mute | in my heart | mix |
| director | atlantic | We Thrive On Big Cities | ad prod / mix |
| sandi thom | sony bmg | what if | mix |
| paolo nutini | atlantic | these streets | ad prod / mix |
| hot chip | emi | the warning | mix |
| jim noir | atlantic | my patch | ad prod / mix |
| shawn emanuel | emi | Dreamworld | mix* |
| hard-fi | atlantic | stars of cctv | mix* |
| sugababes | universal / island | taller in more ways | mix* |
| three | |||
| angels with dirty faces | |||
| one touch | |||
| diefenbach | wall of sound | set & drift | ad prod / mix |
| lady sovereign | island | public warning | ad prod / mix* |
| royksopp | wall of sound | only this moment | mix |
| manic street preachers | sony | lifeblood | ad prod / mix |
| erasure | mute | nightbird | mix |
| amy winehouse | universal | frank | mix* |
| helicopter girl | instant karma | voodoo chic | mix |
| siobhan donaghy | london | revolution in me | mix |
| goldfrapp | mute | black cherry | mix |
| virgin souls | polygram | 162 | mix* |
| busted | island | busted | mix |
| kylie | emi | kylie | mix* |
| frou frou | island | details | mix* |
| bush | interscope | the science of things | mix |
| beth hirsch | early days | mix | |
| the frames | ztt | dance the devil | co-prod* |
| seal | ztt | seal II & seal III | engineer |
| art of noise | ztt | seduction of clause debussy | engineer |
| * Denotes album tracks and/or singles only | |||
Mixing In The Digital Age
Excerpt from 'Inside Track'
SOUND ON SOUND AUGUST 2007
Tom Elmhirst began his career at a time when digital audio was already becoming mainstream, and witnessed the spectacular development of the medium close-up and first-hand. “Luckily for me, I started at the tail end of the analogue era and the beginning of the digital age,” he recalls.
“Eighty percent of the sessions I did at SARM in the early ’90s were two-inch analogue, and I learned to count bars, drop in and be disciplined when track laying. Trevor’s multitracks were always immaculate.
You could push the faders up and let the tape run, and it would sound good. I know that was a way of working in those days, but it’s an art that’s disappeared a little in the computer era. People just lay things down, and in the end someone has to come in to make some decisions and sort it all out.
“When I worked with Trevor, our main format was pretty much the Sony 3348 (48-track digital tape recorder). We also had Digidesign’s Sound Designer, which was the beginning of Pro Tools, and which could only be used for two-track digital editing. There was no way you could use it as a stand-alone recorder.
Pro tools crashed all the time, it was a nightmare. I saw it going from two-track to eight-track, to 24-track. I’ve worked with Pro Tools from the beginning so it’s not an alien format for me. I love what I can do with it.”
Elmhirst’s experiences at SARM and with Horn have clearly influenced his current working methods. It shows in his strong preference for working on analogue boards, particularly the Neve VR, and he acknowledges that his habit of submixing sprawling master files before beginning his ‘proper’ mix mirrors Chris Lord-Alge’s habit of mixing Pro Tools files down to a 3348 (see May 2007’s Inside Track).
The main purpose for both mixers is to get to know, condense and organise the material they’re given. “What Lord-Alge does is exactly the same mentality,” says Elmhirst, “but I just don’t see the point of submixing to another format, so I premix back to Pro Tools.
I prefer working on the Neve because of the headroom the desk has. Obviously I understand the fundamentals of mixing, so when I said that I’m not a technical mixer, I meant that I’m probably a little lax with things like headroom.
When using an SSL, it would be probably overloading quite a bit, so I need the flexibility and headroom of the Neve.
I don’t like VCAs, and prefer Neve’s Flying Faders, which essentially work with automatable volume pots – the automation is very straightforward and simple. I can do tricks like panning and so on in the computer, while on the board I just want to cut and ride the faders.
I find that over time I’m using less and less in terms of effects, and so working on the desk is all about balancing. Mixing in the box? Forget it, it’s not for me at all. I’ll sometimes mix in the box for stems, but I will always bring the full mix up on the board.”
Read the complete Inside Track article in August 2007 edition of Sound On Sound
Interview by Nigel Jopson
Resolution Magazine
May/June 2006 Issue
Tom Elmhirst is making a name for himself in sculpting the sound for some of the UK’s coolest new bands. He talks to Nigel Jopson about Neves, playing on the songs he mixes and the politics of stems.
Tom Elmhirst is a lead exemplar of the current crop of top engineers — old enough to have learnt the trade in an era of tape reels but young enough to be at the top of the game. He’s a specialist mix engineer, busy working on albums for hot new signings such as Paolo Nutini, Diefenbach, Hot Chip and Lady Sovereign. Tom mixed the Royksopp single Only This Moment as well as singles for Sugababes and Hard Fi.
He started his career working for production Svengali Trevor Horn at Sarm Studios, for whom he recorded Wendy and Lisa, The Art Of Noise and Seal. He experienced the dramatic escalation in recording workflow as Sony DASH PCM recorders were replaced by early Digidesign systems at Horn’s studio, and made the move to freelancing under the stewardship of Sarm’s in-house management team (he is currently managed by Osohso Music Management).
A stint assisting Steve Albini recording Bush hatched a good working relationship with the band, which landed Tom a breakthrough job recording and mixing their album The Science Of Things. Working with programmer Johnny Rockstar on this session led to a meeting with All Saint’s producer Cameron McVey, which in turn led to work with Sugababes, for whom Tom recorded and mixed the album One Touch and several singles
Three years later, Elmhirst was mixing the critically acclaimed Black Cherry album for Goldfrapp, and working on signature albums for major label artists such as the Manic Street Preachers’ Lifeblood. Resolution spoke to Tom as he prepared to push up some faders on the Neve VR in Room C at London’s Metropolis Studios.
Was it your call to mix here on the Neve VR72?
Yes, I like the connection I have with it, it’s very immediate, nothing’s happening that I can’t see and it’s fairly limited in what it can do. The VR is quite a purist mixer, essentially you’re dealing with balance, there aren’t endless pages of menus. I grew up working on SSLs at Sarm, the very first time I worked on a Neve was when I went freelance. I would never dream of mixing out of two outputs in Pro Tools, I like the physical bit of mixing ... I like pushing it, which you can’t really do in a computer, I find you run out of headroom quite quickly!
The Neve has a fantastic amount of headroom, I’m quite ill-disciplined, I know that if I was mixing on an SSL things would be going red here and there. I just don’t get that with this board, and if I do get it I rather like it. People have this misconception that SSLs sound hard and Neve is soft and warm and cuddly — I can make it plenty hard if you want! I would mix on an SSL, but I like the simplicity and the headroom of the Neve.
Have you got a system for setting up your mix?
I throw it all up really quickly, I have an extremely short attention span so I won’t spend two hours on the drums. I know what I want to do, it’s just finding how I get there. I use the A and B bus on the VR console a lot: I set up the A bus to cut all the vocals and the B bus to cut the music. Then I can switch between the two really quickly without altering any automation I’ve written. I’m quite lazy by nature so I just want the quickest, easiest, fastest route to what I want to do. I don’t want to start by picking up a pen to change modes, to save a mix, to undo a mix ... here [on the VR] even while the mix is running I can turn the automation off, undo and go back ... and it will be running again.
There’s no pen or menu and just a very limited PC file system, it’s kind of idiot-proof in that sense. I’m not a very technical engineer, I don’t use a massive amount of outboard, and I’m not hugely bothered if it’s 96k or 8k, if the song feels right and what’s coming out of the speakers is good then I’m happy.
Looking across the console, you haven’t got many EQs punched in ...
I don’t really use a lot of EQ — it’s all done on faders — there’s a lot of automation and rides. A lot of my EQs are getting rid of things, cutting frequencies. We’d all like to have the space in our tracks that Hip-Hop and R&B has, where the bass is usually extremely syncopated, not sustaining with lengthy notes, so nothing is getting in the way.
Have you got a favourite piece of outboard you can’t do without?
I find I use less and less outboard gear as I’ve gone on. When I first started engineering I probably plugged every single bit in! The Manley (Variable Mu) compressor over the mix, I’d struggle without that. Manleys make a mix sound like those old records — when the vocal goes away — back comes the music, and I love that. You can tuck the vocal in the track a bit more. All my drums mostly go through a Neve compressor on a separate bus.
Today I’m using a GML 8200 parametric EQ to give a little bit of a smiley face curve on the stereo bus. I used the Avalon EQ for a while and I also like the Manley Massive Passive, it’s lovely but quite coloured. The GML is fairly hard, it sharpens tracks up and makes everything sound more ‘like a record.’
I’ve noticed you don’t use a lot of reverb in your mixes. For example, the Manic Street Preacher’s Lifeblood is very full sounding, but there’s hardly any room on the instruments.
I do use reverb, but I don’t want to hear an ‘s’ going off into a long reverb. The Manic’s album was quite complicated because they made a point, well before I got involved, of not doing a lot of guitar on the record. That presented quite a challenge ... a guitar band without guitars! When I got the tracks they were very bare, I did quite a lot of extra work drum-wise and I played several synth and electronic string parts — they loved it and were almost pushing me to do more. I suppose like most people behind the glass, there’s a part of me that’s a frustrated artist.
Do you often program extra drums or play keyboards on your mixes?
I do have one bass drum I particularly like, it’s on a lot of records. You don’t hear it because there are other things going on in the track, but it just fulfils a certain requirement. Other times I might use loops ... if I was given a track to mix by a label and mixed exactly what they had given me ... I don’t think they’d be satisfied. I’ve done that and had the reaction — they expect more — The Manic’s album is definitely one where I went to town a bit.
The song For the love of Richard Nixon was much more organic originally, I put a lot of drums in and some mad synthi sections after the chorus. I liked the track because it was about the Vietnam era, and I thought it was a really bold statement to have that song as the first single.
You’re also fond of quite radical panning, like on the Diefenbach’s Set And Drift.
Trevor Horn was a great one for either left, right or in the middle. I much prefer records that highlight four great parts rather than 14 mediocre ones. A record I’ve just done from Hot Chip has incredible panning. Panning can be a dynamic thing, although I haven’t quite got to the Beatles stage yet. I have another mixing rule about Pro Tools sessions: it has all got to fit on one screen. Even if I receive a session with 96 tracks, I will bounce until it is on one screen. It’s a mental thing, I need to see it on one screen, and mixing down the tracks is a great way of learning the song.
I might get sessions with hundreds of tracks — the first five hours of the mix is on the Auratones — just figuring it all out. On an album project like Set & Drift with Diefenbach, I will often bring in my own Pro Tools rig, I’ll be mixing a track and an assistant can have the next track up, I’ll go over to listen for a few minutes and have them bounce the tracks.
I heard the Goldfrapp album involved rather an abundance of tracks...
That record was very constructed. There are a lot of noises that are musical, but not a lot of music. It was put together painstakingly by Will Gregory and Alison Goldfrapp over a long period of time, almost jigsaw style. When you have eight basses, what do you do, pan two left, two right and four in the middle?!
They had had the chance to live with it ... the final mixed album was a composite of some of my mixes, some of their stems, some of Dave Bascombe’s stems ... it was incredibly laborious. It wasn’t perhaps the best technical approach to completely deconstruct it to give to me in Pro Tools, because they use Logic. But it worked out fine, the end result was a brilliant record, although there was indeed a certain amount of arithmetic involved.
It’s always hard to jump into a project that’s benefited from a very slow bake at the recording stage, isn’t it?
Before I stepped into the control room on that project, what they had already was brilliant. It’s that situation where you are being asked to do a job and you are trying to validate your contribution .. if I had never been involved it would still have been a very good record, just in certain places it just needed a little more width. I remember with Train I was pretty much left alone to go to town.
Do you prefer to mix without the artist or producer in the control room?
Quite often I will do a couple of mixes for an artist and they will say – great, do the album. Then they get involved ... and then it starts to become more complex. I’m quite militant when I’m mixing. To me a mix takes a day and a bit — for example on this session, people are coming in at one o’clock — I did most of the mix last night.
I don’t want anyone around on the first day of my mix: to me, mixing is not a spectator sport, I don’t like someone sitting there watching me do what I do. I’ve had to explain that quite carefully to a few people ... it’s not me being rude, it’s just that I need to do my thing and it won’t make a lot of sense to you or me until quite close to the end, when it all comes together!
You mentioned working from stems — do you find that’s an increasing trend nowadays?
Sometimes I’ve heard my own stems on other people’s mixes. I’ve heard my vocal delays — it’s quite quick to get a track going around a stereo vocal acapella — all the effects and rides are done. But it’s not your own mix if you’ve only done that. I try to be reasonably ethical about that, if I’m sent a multitrack that has been mixed already and there are stems on disk, I won’t use them in my mix. I just feel that if someone has spent five hours going through vocals comping and de-essing it’s a bit unfair to take kudos for their hard work — unless they are going to be credited, obviously.
Some people I know don’t give their stems back on the disk, there’s rather a grey area at the moment relating to stems. Similarly if I do a lot of sound replacement and play several extra musical parts for a mix, do I give back the disk I was given, or the session that I’ve done with my work? I do give my own work and instrument tracks back, otherwise I would have gigabytes of music that doesn’t belong to me: there’s a legal title to be considered as well, I don’t know what the copyright implications might be.
Another Resolution interviewee, Joe Chiccarelli, commented that the increasing proliferation of sessions across disks means the true whereabouts of multitrack masters for many newer hit albums is probably completely unknown.
I think this is going to come back to haunt record labels in 10 to 15 years. It is quite resonant with the way we live now ... a sort of bullshit lifestyle. Once it’s been released and it’s in the shops and the label have made their money, nobody gives a shit about it anymore. It’s gone. We spent years being trained to archive properly at Sarm: look at the track sheet ... work of art, a good track sheet!
But that’s not my job now, I give the record company back what I’m commissioned to do — the mix — but you figure as the music is their catalogue, their asset, labels would perhaps be looking a bit deeper into how to protect it.
A specialist mix engineer is generally thought of as several notches up from a plain recording engineer. Is this a step towards production for you, or is it an end in itself?
That’s a good question ... there is a part of me that is wary of going into full-on production because of the time demands involved. I don’t really do any recording any more, in fact I don’t even work with many producers anymore, I find that record companies book me when they need a fresh angle on a track. I don’t miss sitting around recording 85 tracks of vocals — it’s much easier for me now to complain about the state of the multitrack if I haven’t bothered to go and record it myself!
Because of the quick turnaround on a mix, you can give me a song and in two days I can add production on it — I can get musicians in or do it myself. I don’t know if I would want to spend three months in a residential studio going through bass parts. I do like the high turnover and spontaneous nature of mixing.
So you’ve no ambition to be the next Rick Rubin?
I think there’s a place for all of us, for every type of recording professional. I get to do a bit of production on tracks, so I get to satisfy that side of me, but I absolutely adore finishing records. However, if the right project came along ... it would be difficult to turn it down!
The Graduate
ug 1, 2007 12:00 PM
By Max Herman
Producer Mark Ronson talks about recording Lily Allen, Amy Winehouse and his unusual take on a covers album, Version, which melds soul horns and strings with modern pop and rock songs.
It's 10:30 in the morning, and Mark Ronson is waking up after a rare DJ gig the previous night at Club Love in New York. This British-born Manhattanite sounds tired but content. “It was the first time I'd DJ'd in New York in ages, so it was actually fun,” he says.
To be more exact, it's been about six months since Ronson has spun in Manhattan — the borough that made him famous for his selector skills. But one fulfilling evening doesn't override his feeling of burnout. “I don't enjoy [DJing] five nights a week — playing new hip-hop and stuff — because it doesn't really get me that excited anymore,” he laments.
Some 14 years in the booth can do that to you. Ronson still gets his fill by spinning recent hip-hop hits, electro, rock and remixes of his own records — primarily at the renowned YOYO parties in London and for his weekly Internet show “Authentic Shit” on East Village Radio. Those couple gigs aside, he's no longer keen on being the celebrity DJ that he became in the late-'90s by entertaining the rich and famous. As fun as it was rocking parties for Tommy Hilfiger and Diddy, it wasn't enough creatively.
By 2000, Ronson found a new outlet with a piece of equipment he was already familiar with as a hip-hop head: the MPC. His first notable production work was heard on vocalist Nikka Costa's album, Everybody Got Their Something (Virgin, 2001), and two years later on his solo debut, Here Comes the Fuzz (Elektra, 2003). This anything-goes party album featured everyone from Sean Paul to Saigon and saw Ronson translate his kinetic turntable magic onto wax.
“[Producing] totally made me stop DJing because it was influencing the kind of music I was making — listening to other people's music too loud until 4 in the morning and not having any desire to go in and make my own [stuff].”
Since cutting back on spinning in clubs in early 2006, Ronson has never been busier on the production front. Christina Aguilera, Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse have all reached out to Ronson recently for his soulful backdrops. During a little downtime from his work for others, the producer recorded his surprising new sophomore album, Version (Allido/RCA, 2007) — a record that was never supposed to happen.
COVER-SONG CONTROVERSY
Like Ronson's DJ sets, his music represents the cutting edge but is also heavily rooted in the old-school. This is particularly true on Version — an album based upon heavy funk covers of mostly modern UK singles (excluding a revamp of Britney Spears' “Toxic” with the late ODB). It's what happens when Brit rock is reintroduced through classic Motown, the JBs and a dash of Parliament Funkadelic.
Ronson's sonic time warp all began with a cover of Radiohead's ubiquitous 1996 hit “Just.” But at the time he recorded the song for the compilation Exit Music: Songs With Radio Heads (Rapster, 2006), the producer had no plans for making an album of cover songs. It took time for Ronson to realize that replacing the lively seven-second guitar break on songs like “Just” with old-school soul was something he could achieve on a grander scale. Of course, the fans of the bands he wound up covering on Version weren't always equally enthusiastic about the process.
When Remix talks to him, Ronson still sounds a bit agitated by a particular 14-year-old fan of The Smiths, who sent him an irate letter via MySpace about making an R&B cover of the band's hit “Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before” with Aussie vocalist Daniel Merriweather. And pubescent Morrissey/Smiths fanatics aren't the only ones challenging Ronson's records. Just this spring, Alex Turner of indie-rock royalty Arctic Monkeys told British tabloid The Sun that he “can't stand” the new version of “Stop Me.”
“There's always going to be people that are gonna have problems with a cover album, just inherently,” says Ronson, who can rest easy knowing that amid the hate, his Smiths cover has already been played more than 300,000 times (as of this writing) on MySpace. Moreover, his new single with Lily Allen, “Oh My God” — a highly danceable remake of the Kaiser Chiefs hit — is also catching on remarkably well.
“Overall, [Version] is definitely one of the most successful things I've ever worked on, which is kinda strange because when I made the record, I didn't have a deal — I was just making stuff that I wanted to play as a DJ,” Ronson explains. “I was just bored with a lot of the music that was available to me, and I was just like, ‘Aw, fuck it!’”
ACQUISITIONS AT ALLIDO
Deep within downtown Manhattan is where Mark Ronson not only does business — as co-owner of his Allido imprint with Rich Kleiman — but it's where he writes and records in the label's nicely equipped in-house studio. Ronson has only one request regarding working conditions when making music here: “It just has to be quiet in the studio,” he says humbly. That's not much to ask, and as you'll soon find out, Ronson is rather easy to work with.
But before he welcomes others into the studio, this soul purveyor sits at his Akai MPC3000 LE developing drum patterns. While the drums were the first instrument Ronson picked up as a kid, he admits to not being able to play them all that well. Thus he prefers recording the MPC pads to develop a track and then adds live percussion later. “The beats all come from the MPC, and then depending on what I think the song should start with — a keyboard, the guitar, a bass line — that determines what I should put on top,” he explains. “I just find a beat that I like on the MPC and then lay it into Pro Tools and then just add all the live instrumentation on top of that.”
Sticking to his old-school sensibilities, Ronson often draws from his collection of vintage keys: a Roland RS-101 Strings synth, a Wurlitzer electric piano, a Hohner Clavinet D6 and Yamaha grand piano, to name a few. “The only new thing that I use is a Nord Electro because I don't have a hammer board, and it has a pretty good sound.”
Even with vocals, Ronson likes to take it back as heard on “Valerie” with Amy Winehouse. Here, using an old RCA DX77 ribbon mic through a Neve mic pre, the soul singer's Motown-esque tone simply pops.
Soon after recording a handful of tracks with the aforementioned gear, Columbia UK picked up his new album (via Allido), and all of a sudden, there was a budget. With the dough came a world of possibilities. After working with funk/soul band The Dap-Kings on Winehouse's Back to Black [Republic, 2007] album, Ronson called upon the horn players from the Brooklyn group to help blow out the covers on Version. He also hired large string sections — a move he never thought he could pull off.
“After working on Amy Winehouse's record, that was sort of my first experience producing and arranging by myself in front of a band and going in front of a string section — something that maybe I would have been a little bit intimated to do before. So once I had the learning block of getting over that working on Amy's record, that's when I was able to have the confidence, and that's when we brought that into my own record.”
MR. EASYGOING
There's a funny story behind the creation of the cover of The Zutons “Valerie” with Winehouse. As heard on her latest album, Winehouse is a huge fan of horns. But when it came down to adding strings, she wasn't having it. Instinctively, Ronson knew the strings needed to appear on this breezy track, but he wasn't going to fight with Winehouse, who adamantly protested the addition. “Basically, I kinda had to go behind her back to put the strings on the record,” he admits.
Call him passive, but Ronson isn't the type to blow his top in the studio. When asked about his reputation for being easygoing, he says, “Yeah, I am kind of easy to work with. I mean, I don't have any screaming fits or anything. I like shit to sound good, but other than that, I'm pretty easygoing.”
Vocalist Daniel Merriweather first worked with Ronson on Here Comes the Fuzz in 2003 and gets along so well with the producer that he's asking him to arrange a bulk of his forthcoming debut, The Fifth Season (Allido/J). “Mark has an amazing ability to literally view making music as if he's hanging out with friends,” says Merriweather. “And I think that's why Amy's record sounds so good — that's why the stuff he's done with Lily [Allen] sounds so good because he surrounds himself with people who he actually enjoys being around and they just have fun and make music.”
When approached about working on Version, Merriweather had never even heard The Smiths song he helped cover, although none of that mattered. “He always has this understated, modest way of telling me what he's doing, and he explained it to me as if he was making a couple songs for fun and there was no expectation of a release or anything,” Merriweather recalls. “It was really organic, like, ‘Hey, I've recorded this song with my friends, and it's my favorite Smiths song…can you sing on it?’ As soon as I heard it, I understood where he was going with it.”
MIXDOWN AT METROPOLIS
While a majority of the songs for Version were recorded in New York at Allido, Ronson did some last-minute revisions across the pond in London. After meeting British composer and arranger Chris Elliot while working on Winehouse's Back to Black, Ronson knew collaborating with him for the finishing touches of the album would be wise. “A week before we had to mix [Version], I just went to his house and played him the music, and we came up with some stuff together,” Ronson says. “That was my first experience with an arranger, and he had really good ideas.”
Ronson proceeded with Elliot to the West London confines of Metropolis Studios to redo the strings and brass sections. And it was at Metropolis where Ronson ran back into another associate from the Back to Black sessions: engineer Tom Elmhirst, who mixed a quarter of the tracks on Version. Like Daniel Merriweather, Elmhirst has nothing but good things to say about working with Ronson.
“He's extremely accommodating in that he'll let you get on with it, and I think his concern is more musical rather than what I call nitpicking,” Elmhirst says. “It's very much about, ‘How does the whole track feel? How does the song work?’ rather than some mundane detail, which is great.
Having mixed Back to Black, Elmhirst was already familiar with Ronson's robust funk/soul sound that relied so much on horns and big-band arrangements. “[Version] was very much a continuation of what we'd done on Amy's record, which was that thing of having people play but make it sound contemporary as well,” Elmhirst explains. “On the mix side, I was really keen for it to kick. So a lot of times with The Dap-Kings, I'd be blowing up the sounds to make them heavier with samples to make it kick as well.”
As a veteran who's worked with Moby, Bush, Goldfrapp and dozens of others, Elmhirst takes a purist's approach to mixing. Working behind a Neve VR72, he likes the physical aspect of the console. “I enjoy the mixing side of it rather than just pushing a mouse up and down the whole time,” he says. “But it's pretty conventional — Pro Tools|HD, and I managed to get it all out of 48 outputs.”
With his love of reggae, Elmhirst used acquired techniques to slip in a little Caribbean flavor on Version. “On a lot of the horns I'll put a delay on them, but what you have to do with horns sometimes so they can come through clean and [with] that old, almost Motown sound — sometimes you need to distress them a bit so it's extremely broad frequency-wise,” Elmhirst explains. “So I'll put shelves on them, I'll put Lo-Fi on them — anything to sort of crunch 'em up and put 'em into place. And the way the [horns] were tracked, they weren't played individually — they were played as a group, so you've got a nice blend.”
IN RETROSPECT
From time to time, Ronson will curse himself for not thinking of potential cover songs sooner. “Limp” by Fiona Apple and Usher's “Caught Up” are two that he never got to see through to the end. Although, given the impressive lineup of talent and engineers who helped seal the deal, he can't complain about the finished product. Looking back to how far he's come since his debut, Ronson feels that there's almost no comparison with Version.
“On the first record, I was working more in the mindset of a DJ wanting to make a fun party album [with] hip-hop, rock, disco and soul in 40 minutes,” he says. “And it was a bit muddled at times and maybe a bit A-D-D-ish, but I was 25 when I made it, and that was the kind of shit that I was probably capable of at the time. I think growing as a producer and an arranger has definitely helped this album.
“There's nothing premeditated or calculated about [Version], and that's a good inspiration. All the music that I've worked on [over] the past year — it's with people in a room who made music because we wanted to listen to that kind of music.”
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