Message from the Future (May 2018 remaster) - Gillies & Ogden

This track was produced with my good friend and collaborator Richard Ogden at some point in early 2006. There are in total about 6 or 7 tracks that came out of this partnership, which I will refer to as “The G&O Sessions”.

Richard and I met in 2005 and very soon thereafter decided to hold recording sessions without a particular plan or genre in mind. What began with unstructured Jams on bass, guitar, keyboards and synthesisers very quickly evolved into something a bit more sophisticated as we developed a working method.

In order to maintain the fun and spontaneity of just improvising together, I would set up and record the sessions in their entirety. Then I would spend the week combing through the various takes to find little moments of inspiration, and re-edit these into a framework for our next jam. Richard and I would begin the following session by listening to and discussing these ideas, and then overdub them with live performances. Then the process would continue again while we built up more complete tracks.

I have a strong memory of Richard, who - as a reasonably accomplished bass player, playing very busy lines - felt he wasn’t contributing enough to the tracks. This was probably not helped by the fact that I would find little improvised hooks in the recordings, and get him to play them over and over so I could capture minute variations in his tone and timing. His patience with my “method” can’t be overstated.

Production Notes

This brings me to the core of these recordings: as simple as the basslines sound, I built all of the G&O tracks around Richard’s bass sound, from multiple DI and microphone takes of his Yamaha Bass and Marshall Amp in the spare room of our house at Scarborough. I hope that this is evident in the finished product, with the bass sitting front and centre at all times.

I did multiple takes of Richard’s bass amp, with two mics placed at varying distances, and ran a DI straight into the mixer as well. This was how I got the booming sound, and this also taught me how to selectively eq the separate tracks to make them sit together.

The original recording was very minimal, limited as it was by technology at the time. The sounds were recorded into Cubase SX via a much-loved Mackie Mixer, and processed with very little in the way of effects, as VST instruments were still in their fledgling state (and somewhat limited by processing power at the time). Most of the source electronic sounds came from my ever-faithful Korg N series synth, which to this day remains both the most frustrating instrument I own (as it’s an absolute dog to programme) and the synth most capable of beautiful, sweeping, textured soundscapes. I was also using a freeware soft synth called Pyramid (I think?) which was a fantastic moog-y sounding instrument, and another modular soft synth called Crystal, which did all manner of unpredictable things that added to the fun. I’m certain that my minimal arrangement style was based on a realisation that many of the artists I liked at the time used the editing and mixing process to introduce timbral and rhythmic complexity into the finished product.

The process of re-mastering was done by converting the 16 Bit stereo recording into the 32 Bit realm in Pro Tools. I created three parallel tracks and applied a variety of eq’s and through some fiddly trickery with gates and filters, managed to send off different parts of the spectrum to some emulations of tape delay and analog saturation. Balancing all of the competing levels from the original recording was a huge challenge for me, and I can see the need to address this more in the mixing stage in future. The final master ended up being a dynamic edit between three stereo versions of the track, with a hint of compression to gel the peak moments together, and a tiny bit of limiting to bring up the quieter sections without crushing an already very compressed sound.