Q:I’ve been geeking out on my Yamaha RX-11 and Alesis HR-16, and they have made me wonder if you and John sequenced your patterns on the machines themselves or if you were sequencing with Performer for your first and second albums (and early demos)? If you did use the machines, did you use the tape backup features to save patterns? Or did you save stuff on your Macs? Did you ever perform live with the actual drum machines instead of backing tapes?
JF: Just yesterday I pulled out a box with our HR-16 and a later version-the HR-16B?-in a black housing, but I haven’t plugged them in. I loved that box.
There are always big transitions in music technology, but the technology of electronic music was moving really really fast between ‘83 until…. it’s hard to say when it stopped. It kind of came out of the lab and into pop music in those years, with lots of surprising drum machines, keyboards and ultimately sampling devices that would make the whole music scene seem like there was unlimited newness just over the horizon.
There were one and a half big years between the Yamaha (which basically defines much of the drum sound of our first album) and the Alesis (which is the sound of Lincoln) Yes, we sequenced drum patterns of songs directly on the RX-15 and used the cassette tape back up feature extensively. There were a lot of features that made the Yamaha cool but limited at the same time, like the lack of sensitivity in the pads (kind of uncool) freed things up to allow heavy handed hammering on the hard metal buttons (which was a blast)
Over the course of making our first album (made with essentially no money with tracks often built on 4 channel rhythm tracks constructed for our show and then used as the foundation for demos) our methods evolved with an eye on keeping sounds cleaner and cleared. The struggle of working against hiss and noise was constant, and was in no way charming. But for us in ’86-’87 hiss still seemed preferable to early attempts at syncing systems. It seemed we were constantly walking into sessions where the people leaving were pulling their hair out having NEVER been able to get things to fully sync or having lost sync at the worst moment as they were trying to mix their master. I don’t know exactly when MIDI rolled out but between the Roland proprietary sync and witnessing early MIDI adopters, it all just seemed like a world of pain.
That all changed very quickly in ’88 while tracking Lincoln, when we moved our base from where we had recorded our first album, Studio Pass (the public assess studio primarily set up to help out experimental electronic musicians), to Al Houghton’s Dubway (a small studio facility in The Music Building off of Times Square) and actually committed to working with sync track and discovered the joy of the emerging MIDI technology.
We tracked much of the Lincoln album syncing MIDI from Performer (now Digital Performer) off a floppy disc with an Apple Macintosh (I think this was the original one, pre-SE…) our trusty RX-15 and bass often from the studios Akai sampler.
We had received an urgent message from Mr. Chris Butler (from the band The Waitresses) who had either witnessed a demo of or caught word that the new Alesis HR-16 was awesome, and we should seriously consider waiting to mix our album after the box hit the market, which was just a couple of months off. The sounds of the Alesis were significantly more sophisticated than anything on the market, and the unit offered a lot of mixing versatility. We followed his advice, which made for what was a fortuitous, but essentially backward process of deciding on the drums and bass sound AFTER the rest of the audio was tracked. (Maybe it would be better described as a second layer of decision making informed by the rest of the tracks of the song, but it definitely made the recordings more powerful and focused) Reflecting on it now, the Alesis actually sonically pulled things BACK from full tilt bone-crushing KAHH! snare sound of the RX15 to either the HR-16s (kind of authentic?) sounding piccolo snare ping or it’s papery white-noisey “brush” snare. Those sounds were simply not available from a drum machine before ’88. And while there are production values on the Lincoln album that fully place it squarely in the big 80s, I am grateful that the varied and often smaller sounds of the HR-16 arrived just in time
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