Guy Sigsworth

interview
guy
sigsworth
music
after midi
GUY SIGSWORTH: PRODUCER,
ARRANGER & MUSICIAN
What’s the connection
between Madonna and
Stockhausen? Sam Inglis
meets a producer who puts
the ‘art’ into chart music...
s long as there’s been mainstream pop
music, it has absorbed ideas, sounds and
production techniques from the avant
garde. The experiments of modern
classical musicians, studio freaks or arthouse
bands are co-opted to make the next generation of
chart singles sound fresh, and ideas that were
initially challenging to listeners swiftly become
familiar. Any modern dance record would have
sounded utterly alien to the audiences of the ’50s,
yet we no longer raise an eyebrow at unearthly
synths and samples, bizarre treated vocals, or
rhythms that no human drummer could play.
Of course, this constant reinvention couldn’t
happen without pop artists and producers who are
willing to take the risk of alienating their
audiences by incorporating new ideas into their
music. Names such as The Velvet Underground,
Kraftwerk, Can, David Bowie, The Residents, The
Beatles, and The Beach Boys spring to mind: and
one that surely must feature on any list is that of
Madonna. Her unprecedented success, spanning
nearly 20 years, is a direct reflection on her
unerring skill in seeking out new sounds, fashions
and musical collaborators. Madonna’s recent work
with William Orbit and Mirwais has again
succeeded in deriving massive mainstream
success from underground influences, and her
latest single ‘What It Feels Like For A Girl’ shows
off the talents of another producer with a
determination to explore new sonic territory:
Guy Sigsworth.
A
opportunity to co-write and play keyboards on
Seal’s debut album, which was produced by Trevor
Horn. Since then, he has pursued a varied career
as producer, arranger, and musician working with
artists such as Bomb The Bass, Bjork, Talvin Singh
and Lamb, while building up his own West London
studio. Most recently, he’s put his other projects
on hold to finish an album he’s been recording
with singer Imogen Heap, under the provisional
band name Frou Frou.
Though he’s yet to enjoy the fame that has
accrued to Orbit and Mirwais, Guy Sigsworth is
equally innovative in his approach to recording
and production, and has embraced the world of
tapeless digital recording with an almost unique
190
SOUND ON SOUND • march 2001
Photos: Piers Allardyce.
Digital Evangelism
Sigsworth came to pop production from a classical
background, after a spell as a harpsichordist, and
has always had a keen interest in experimental
electronic music. His big break came with the
Guy Sigsworth and Imogen Heap in
Imogen’s writing studio.
zeal. “I went to Madonna’s gig at the Brixton
Academy, and I met the guy who’d had to arrange
the songs for her band,” he says. “When it came to
my song, he said ‘I didn’t understand what one
sound on the multitrack was.’ Because around that
time I’d made a conscious decision to write
directly into Pro Tools and to completely stop
using MIDI. I’d seen people buy Pro Tools, but use
it with some kind of other front end for the sake of
the MIDI, so that the most powerful audio
manipulator ever invented was left hidden behind
a Cubase or a Logic front end. I thought ‘Why don’t
I switch off the MIDI, force myself to go and play
things in, and then sequence them directly on the
Pro Tools screen. That way, I’ll get a feel for what’s
amazing about this new digital audio way of
working.’ So all the sounds on that record were
created that way. I’d maybe play some chords on
an electric piano or a guitar, and then I’d sounddesign them in Pro Tools; chop them up, reverse
bits of them, whatever. And that’s basically how
every sound in the whole multitrack was done. The
opening sound I got by playing four chords on a
Rhodes piano. I stuck them in Pro Tools, put a grid
across them, chopped bits, reversed bits, and it
made a pulsing sound. And then the left- and the
right-hand side are the same sample of me playing
the same chords, but tuned down an octave in
one. With the drums, I took some sounds off an
old DMX drum machine, then used plug-ins and
stuff to process them. But I did the programming
and sequencing of them just on the main screen of
Why Pro Tools Is Better Than MIDI
“I used to work with Ataris, and I thought that
they were great with MIDI,” says Guy
Sigsworth. “But when Macs came out I just
hated the MIDI on them, I always thought that
tracks which sounded super-tight to me on an
old Atari sounded messy with the same data on
Macs. I think eventually they got it together,
but when I was first hearing friends’ music
using Macs, it was like ‘Oh, no, they’ve lost
the vibe’. And also I found that MIDI programs
in the Mac just got absurdly complicated, you
wound up with something like 20 screens to
look at, and I love the fact that in Pro Tools you
basically spend the whole time only looking at
one screen. I also think it’s more accurate than
MIDI. You can put a note anywhere you want in
time — you just put it on the grid and say ‘I
want it there’, and it’s not going to move. And
you don’t have the delay that you get with
MIDI. Where you put it is where you put it.”
Pro Tools. Nothing was played in via MIDI. And
that’s how I like to work now.
“I love using Pro Tools as the source of sounds,
using digital audio and celebrating it. There are
rock records which are more heavily Pro-Toolsed
than anything by the Aphex Twin, but they’re
using Tools purely to make so-so performances
sound miraculous, while pretending it’s a
rock & roll band jamming in the cellar. They’re
frightened to expose the front end of the digital
audio, to make what it’s doing blatant and
in-your-face, which I find much more exciting.
I mean, I’ve gone as far as drawing clicks directly
onto the screen in Pro Tools to create waveforms
— really making it explicit.
“I love the basic Audiosuite plug-ins in Pro
Tools. It’s now got some nice reverbs and stuff like
that, but it’s particularly all those De-fis, Lo-fis,
Sci-fis, Vari-fis, they’re great. It’s really just like
sound design from square one, literally putting a
sine wave into Pro Tools and by the end of it you
wind up with something from Neptune. I think
with the Audiosuite plug-ins, you can just go on a
roll as you’re creating an idea. Normally I’ve got a
very clear idea in my head of what I’m after, and
then I loop some bars of music. You can keep the
bars looping in Tools, and then as you try
something like ‘What if I stick this bar through a
ring modulator?’ it just keeps cycling, and then
you do it and after one cycle the processed file
comes in and hear the variation, so you can decide
whether or not to keep it. I love it, I’ve been
waiting for it all my life.”
Performance Enhancements
march 2001 • SOUND ON SOUND
191
▲
As well as the experimental possibilities thrown up
by Pro Tools, tapeless digital audio also appeals to
Guy for more pragmatic reasons: “Despite all this
mucking around, I do love real human
performance, and one of the joys of digital is that
in some ways I think it makes it easier for singers
just to do what they do. If you are going to edit
the vocal they can see what you’re doing, and they
feel much more empowered than in the days when
there would just be some guy on a mixing desk
moving faders. I don’t really drop in any more,
I just let them sing and say ‘Look, if you make a
mistake, just finish the take, do another take,
we’re not going to go back over that bit unless you
really can’t get it at all, because we’ve probably
got it on another take.’ Or they can sing the right
bit in the wrong part of the song, and it’s not a
problem. I’m not in the least bit sentimental about
reel-to-reel recording. One of the most horrifying
things in the world is having to use two analogue
tape machines slaved together. I think that’s the
most painful thing, waiting while one takes 20
bars to get in tune with the other one — and then
you want the singer to drop in after that?
“Another empowering thing in Pro Tools is that
if you know what you want to hear, if you’ve got
the idea that the riff should be this, you’ll get it
eventually, because even if you have to play it one
note at a time into Pro Tools, you’ll do it. And
interview
guy
sigsworth
▲
unprecedented ways. Again, it’s like having eight
pairs of hands on the dial of a Lexicon or
something.”
You might think, then, that Guy Sigsworth
would be enthused by the idea of using tactile
moving-fader control surfaces to manipulate his
Pro Tools plug-ins, but he’s emphatic that such
tools are rooted in an old-fashioned way of
working that the digital evangelist leaves behind:
“I think the full-on fake mixing desk thing is not
the way to go, that’s like you’re kidding yourself
again, you don’t want to admit that Pro Tools is
what it is. I think they’re for people who want to
pretend it’s still like an SSL or something. People
who are in denial about digital audio. To me, a
Playstation joypad would make more sense as a
controller than a fake desk console. I prefer to
Guy’s sparse gear shelves, containing
(from top): Akai S3000 sampler, Roland
VP9000 Variphrase processor, Emu
Vintage Keys, Oberheim Matrix 1000 and
Roland XV5080 sound modules, and
Clavia Nord Lead synth.
▲
I think that’s beautiful. If your compositional idea
is clear, you’ll get there in the end, even if your
technical ability to play it is limited.”
Guy’s own keyboard-playing skills are clearly
anything but limited. Some of his material, notably
a take of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Boho Dance’ recorded by
Sigsworth with Bjork for a forthcoming Mitchell
tribute album, features neat improvisation on
traditional keyboard instruments such as the
celesta, which Guy’s mangling in Pro Tools can’t
quite disguise. Other tracks demonstrate his
mastery of the oft-neglected technique of using
the pitch wheel in a synth performance: “When
I was developing my MIDI skills I was really into
the pitch-wheel. I’m fascinated by Indian music,
I’ve worked a lot with Talvin Singh, and I’m
intrigued by how great Indian musicians bend
pitch. I want to understand it, but in my terms, not
necessarily understanding the true theory that an
Indian musician learns. I’ve done things like
sample an Indian phrase and then program against
it, sort of ghosting it to try to get a feel of how
those bends work, because it’s completely
different from blues bends on a rock guitar. Indian
musicians call it ‘meend’, I believe. A lot of
‘east-west fusion’ stuff is still pretty trivial, still in
the world of Peter Sellers, like Kula Shaker
overdubbing a sitar on a soft rock track. I hope
what I do goes a bit deeper than that.”
Pro Tools and modern electronic instruments
also allow the experimentally minded producer to
create new sorts of performance: “I think plug-in
audomation is where the radical possibilities are.
It’s just the same with synths. I know the anoraks
will say that virtual analogue synths aren’t as good
as the originals, that they don’t go out of tune as
wonderfully as the originals, but the automation
possibilities of effectively having eight pairs of
hands on every oscillator, and moving them in a
coordinated way, are radically new. You could
never have done that on a Minimoog in 1973.
I think the automation of plug-ins, reverbs and
things like that, is a fantastic possibility, because it
gives us a chance to manipulate musical space in
Remote Working
There was a time when artists and
A&R people would have to choose
songs on the basis of a simple demo,
perhaps just featuring piano and
vocal. These days, however, the
jobbing producer or songwriter trying
to place his or her song needs to have
a much more completely realised
backing track. The art of attracting an
artist like Madonna is, as Guy
explains, about creating a demo
backing track that is finished enough
to impress, but not so finished that it
restricts the singer/lyricist’s freedom
to write over the top of it: “I’ve done a
lot of sending people tracks, because
there are quite a lot of people who
prefer to collaborate by
192
‘correspondence course’, where you
MP3 them a backing track and then
they have an idea for it and send it
back to you. It’s a difficult job,
because you want to put enough
things in to get them feeling vibey,
but not enough to force them in a
direction that they might not want to
go melodically, or to over-fill a track
so that the singer thinks ‘Help, I can’t
get in’. Even with harmonies and
chords, there’s a way I try and write it
initially so that the sections are vague
enough that if the singer wants to
extend a verse or bridge, or sing over
into the wrong section, it’s not going
to completely interrupt it, even if later
it means you’re going to have to
SOUND ON SOUND • march 2001
tweak the music. Because sometimes
if you put the thing too much in the
box, with big drum fills coming into
the chorus and things like that, if they
don’t want to go there, you’ve kind of
snookered them. You just learn by
doing it, seeing other people
struggling with it later, and thinking
‘I won’t do that again!’
“The Madonna song was done very
quicky. I sent her a backing track,
and she wrote a top line to it, we put
it together and four days later we had
a record. And what was kind of good
for me was that we decided on day
one that we liked all the noises I’d
already used on the demo, and it was
more a matter of repositioning them
in the arrangement around M’s top
line. So the whole job, apart from
recording the voice, was moving
things around in Pro Tools.
“I sent her two sketches, and the
funny thing was that I knew
instinctively that this was the one
she’d like. Everybody else thought
she’d like the other one, but I thought
it was too obviously like a clichéd
Madonna track — which I’m sure she
gets lots of, and I knew she’d more
likely get this, the more unusual one.
And at the start of it, I put this
sample from a movie of the actress
Charlotte Gainsbourg. I just knew that
M would fall in love with that, and she
did.”
interview
guy
sigsworth
▲
think of Pro Tools as a souped-up funky laptop
thing.”
The Oval Office
As you might expect of someone with a
background in modern classical music and a
radical approach to pop production, Guy is very
much in the business of taking experimental art
music to the masses: “I’m very fond of these
electronic pieces Stockhausen did in the 1950s.
He did this piece which took a boy’s voice and
played around with it on tape, and one of the few
effects he had to play with was reverb, and he did
a lot of things where the first note’s completely
dry, the second one as reverbed as possible, the
next one somewhere in the middle. The reverbs
are very dynamic, they’re not like just some vat
you dip the whole thing in, they move around,
they’re very agile, they’re like a nervous animal.
I really like that, so I try to get that hyperactive
approach to space.
“A key feature of the Madonna song that’s a bit
of a Guy trademark is the sound of the CD player
skipping, like when you press fast forward. I’ve
really been inspired by this amazing avant-garde
German band called Oval. I just fell in love with
their music. My favourite tune by them is called
‘Do While’, from the album 94 Diskont — buy it, if
you can find it! Anyway, the only musical
instrument they use is the compact disc player.
They put paint on the CDs, pull Stanley knives
across them, and everything, and then they
re-record the effects of these fractured CDs. It’s
surprisingly beautiful, and often reminds me of
early Steve Reich. They’re totally leftfield,
avant-garde, arthouse digital terrorists, and I’m
trying to make pop tracks with Madonna, so it’s
quite different where we’re taking this idea. After
all these years, people still put vinyl record
scratching on things, so you think, well, where’s
the future? Well, let’s at least catch up with the
CD player. Maybe we should try to find out what
weird noises DVDs and MP3s make!
“People are actually quite timid about new
technology. For instance, Akai samplers had
time-stretching for ages before junglists came
along and said ‘How brilliant is this?’ Before that,
everybody just thought ‘I want to make that thing
a bit longer... Oh, it doesn’t sound very good, it
sounds sort of strange and distorted.’ And then
suddenly the junglists said ‘Hey, it’s brilliant, it
sounds strange and distorted.’ And so I think with
any new technology, you’re always looking for the
errors or the flaws or the idiosyncracies of the
Guy Sigsworth:
“I’ve discovered,
actually, that that’s
a very good
principle: ignore the
spec and buy it on
what it looks like.
Normally things
that look shit
actually are shit,
and things that look
great are good.”
Guy’s Gear: Some Highlights
Guy’s musical equipment is currently distributed
between his own studio and Imogen Heap’s writing
room, on different floors of the same building.
“I’ve never owned very many synthesizers,” he
explains. “I’ve got the Nord Lead and I’ve got one
of those Roland boxes with loads of things in it,
and it’s not exactly a massive armoury. I think the
thing with me is that I owned a sampler before
I owned a synthesizer. I first got a Roland sampler,
an S330, and even when I did Seal’s first album, a
lot of the sounds people think were synths were
samples that I was processing with filters and
stuff. So maybe Pro Tools, which is a kind of
sampler de luxe, is a kind of natural extension of
that. Often, with me, the source sound is
something that probably went down a microphone,
or something like that, but by the time it reaches
you, God knows what’s happened to it.”
• Wurlitzer and Rhodes electric pianos.
“Imogen and I both play keyboards well and we
both like to write on keyboards, and there’s
something about having a real instrument — it’s
probably the fact that they don’t have a MIDI lead
in them. I’m really not against MIDI, honest, but I
realised that when I got asked to do sessions with
people on records, I’d wind up sitting in front of a
screen with somebody saying ‘Can you change that
a bit?’ and I’d end up tweaking one parameter for
hours. But if I turned up with something made in
the 1970s with no MIDI leads in it, they’d know
that all I could do was play it, and they’d either say
‘Play it again’ or ‘That’s brilliant, your cheque’s in
the post.’ It made them commit to the idea, or not,
more quickly.”
• Danelectro Nifty Fifty guitar amplifier.
“That Danelectro amp is great. For the money
it’s amazing. I think it’s about 80 quid or
something. It looks great, that’s why people buy it.
194
SOUND ON SOUND • march 2001
I bought it purely for the looks. I’ve discovered,
actually, that that’s a very good principle: ignore
the spec and buy it on what it looks like. Normally
things that look shit actually are shit, and things
that look great are good.”
• Roland VP9000 Variphrase processor.
“I bought a VP9000 and I’ve been a little bit
disappointed, because I had this idea from the
hype that they might have made audio completely
elastic, which is what I want it to be, but it isn’t
quite there yet. My idea when I bought it was I’d
use it to sample unique sonic moments — a ’cello
harmonic or a boy soprano’s top C, or whatever —
and then play keyboard parts on the sound,
formant-shifted across five octaves. I think one day
they’ll get there, but they’ve released it before
they’ve finished the R&D. One thing I will say for it,
though, is that it’s got great effects.”
• Weltmeister Klavisette 200.
“This is an East German instrument, made in
the 1960s. The mechanism is like an African
thumb piano — it’s got plectra on the notes and
little bars, so it’s like a mechanical version of
that.”
• Touched By Sound spring reverb.
“This is one old-school thing I really love. It’s
really cheap, but it’s brilliant. If you want that old
reggae-type watery sidestick sound it’s just
fantastic. A lot of digital reverbs are, unfortunately,
still horrible.”
• Mackie mixer.
“We don’t mix on the desk at all, we just
monitor through it. Desks are suddenly the least
interesting part of music, I think, they’re not where
it’s at any more.”
• Clavia Nord Lead virtual analogue synth.
“I like the Nord Lead. When I was working with
Lamb, they had one, and I found it very easy to get
things we would react to really quickly. I think one
of the most important things with gear like this is
to get stuff that as soon as you put your hands on
it, something might happen.”
• Tahal Malah electronic tabla.
“Talvin Singh gave me this, it’s a tabla drum
machine. It’s got presets. You select a taal (Indian
rhythmic cycle), and you can adjust the pitch of
the high and low tablas, and the tempo.”
• Korg G5 bass processor.
“It does this kind of fake vocal sound which I’ve
heard on loads of Timbaland records, so it’s
obviously his trade secret as well!”
• Yamaha QY20 pocket sequencer.
“I’m a great believer in the QY20. I think when
Yamaha made it more clever, they lost the plot,
because it should be really basic. It’s got like four
drum kits, and if you don’t like them, you can
f**k off. It makes it really easy to make a musical
decision and get going really quickly.”
Guy’s Pro Tools operator, programmer,
and ‘Akai abuser’ Gili Wiseburgh (front).
thing, the accidental
properties that might turn
out to be features. After
all, guitar distortion is a
mistake, but it’s one that
we now can’t live without.
“I’m fascinated by the
qualities of timestretching. Sometimes I’ve
time-stretched parts and
then time-stretched them
back again, so it’s not to
change the length, it’s just
to get that weird shifting
of the harmonics that
time-stretch puts into a
sound. I discovered a
wicked thing the other day
using the Digidesign Noise
Reduction plug-in. When
you drive it too hard, it
starts, again, to mess with
the harmonics of the
sound you’re putting into
it. You’re meant to show it
an example of the noise it’s trying to remove, and
then you show it the sound it’s got to remove it
from. If you deliberately show it a completely
unrelated sound, so it’s looking for those
harmonics in this other sound, you can create
really weird harmonic resonances.
“I love it when you start pulling down the
sampling rate and you get aliasing, and you can
use it creatively to get a resonant frequency that’s
really strange in the sound. It’s how you get the
mystery into digital, the ghost in the machine
factor. I think it’s those weird quirks, clicks,
glitches, things like that, that are kind of to digital
audio what amp distortion or tape distortion is to
analogue. Before I got my Pro Tools system I was
already into that idea. I used to have two Akais,
and I got into having them digitally hooked up,
and doing things like press ‘sample’ on sampler
two while the sampler one’s sending a signal in,
and then switch off sampler one, so I’ve sampled
the ‘off’ noise mains spike, and I’d think ‘Yeah, I’ll
use that as a kick drum.’ Akais have some great
quirks you can use, like you can record total
silence via the digital link, so you’ve got a sample
that’s in theory got nothing in. But if you gain it up
by 50dB, which you can do in the Akai, you’ll
suddenly get these ghostly little glitches that come
out of nowhere. You can’t even see them on the
screen, but you can hear them. Gili Wiseburgh,
who programs for me, has some great ideas for
Akai abuse based on System Exclusive. You know
if you loop a sample really badly you just get a
kind of tuned buzz? Well, Gili’s found a way to
change the loop length over SysEx, so the ‘buzz’
can do an automated glissando.
“It’s really funny, isn’t it, because on one hand
we’re getting into DVD and people are saying ‘At
last, total fidelity, we’ll be able to record a
symphony orchestra so that it sounds pristine,’
and I’m always looking at stuff and saying ‘As soon
as I’ve got the money I’m going to buy one of
those Prism converters.’ Yet as soon as I’ve got
sounds in there, what am I doing? I’m bit-crushing
them to death, going for two-bit sound! It’s funny
how it pushes you in two directions. Obviously we
do have to make records here, and we can’t spend
all our days doing this geek stuff, but it’s really
fun, and I think it’s what gives you your own
stamp and your own style.”
It’s looking as though Guy Sigsworth will be
making records for some considerable time to
come. His own profile has been raised through his
work with Madonna, and big things are expected
of the Frou Frou project, with a debut album
scheduled for later this year. Whatever he does,
however, his willingness to experiment with
sound, and his uncompromising attitude to digital
recording, will always give his records a unique
stamp and style.