I was scooting about on the net checking up on what all the funky guys were up to from the old Acid Jazz Days, one band in particular during that time a huge influence on me was The James Taylor Quartet, i think i have nearly everything they recorded and i must have seen them 8 times, still got the ticket stubs, I was even in a band that 3/4 of the set was made up of covers from their first 3 albums, i was made up when they released "Whole lotta live 1998" as i was at that show at the Manchester Academy, great days.
So, back to the story, while checking up on who is doing what i came across Jason Glover's site "Vinylizor" and a pic caught my eye, upon closer inspection i saw the familiar screen of the D8Bs fat channel, then on closer inspection sure enough just on the left i could just make out the scrub wheel of a d8b. i was so intrigued i just had to ask him if he would do an interview on how he was using it for the D8B site, and guess what, he said yes he would love too, FANTASTIC.
so......
Hello Jason, I know you are a very bizzy man so thank you so much for spending the time to do this
Hi Chris. I’m more than happy to talk to you - I never get asked for interviews so its been really good for my self esteem!
Q, Amazing, i think you have so much to share, your on so many of my fave CDs, OK, beginnings, where did it all start ?
I started my musical life as a classical trombone player. I went to the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester and freelanced with the BBC Northern and Liverpool Philharmonic orchestras amongst others.
Q, What was your first recording gear, and when did you get into that side of things ?
I got into music tech while at college - I bought an Apple Mac Quadra computer and ran Finale and Cubase hooked up to a pair of EMU Proteus sound modules. Just midi and notation - no audio recording on computers back then.
I moved down to London after I finished college and I got into writing music for TV commercials so I’d expanded my recording setup quite a bit with a Soundcraft desk, an EMU sampler and a Mac that could record audio!
Q Who was you playing with then ?
I was playing in the James Taylor Quartet at this time. Fatboy Slim and Big Beat was the latest
music trend, and off the back of JTQ’s record deal with Zomba, I (along with my brother Dom who was also in the band, and the bass player Gary Crockett) were asked to remix some 60s library music for their library label Bruton. The boss Jez Poole was a big fan of the band and said to us after a gig that he was looking for people to work for him.
Q, Is that what inspired you to co write the"The Sound Stylistics" CDs ? that band captured that sound so well. i love them cds
Yes - it came about because of the emerging Deep Funk scene at the time. It was the music we had always been in to, so we approached Jez Poole and said we thought it would be a good idea to do a Deep Funk album for Universal and he agreed. For those that aren’t aware of the Deep Funk scene, the concept was to do an album that sounded like it was an undiscovered funk record recorded back in the 60’s.
We got in all the best musicians (who were mates of ours anyway) to do the record and then came up with the band name to legitimise it. Universal printed up some promo 7” singles (which sell for good money on eBay - ask Eddie Piller ex Acid jazz boss!), had a launch party at Madam JoJo’s in Soho where Keb Darge and Snowboy DJ’d at, and then they let Freestyle Records license it out commercially. Craig Charles started playing it on his Funk & Soul show on 6Music and before we knew it there was a real buzz about it. We did a few live gigs with the band (Jazz Cafe and Ronnie Scotts London, Blue Note Tokyo) and then did a follow-up album 'Greasin’ The Wheels’. a couple of years later.
Q, Great times i remember them well, Freestyle have done allot to push the whole funk genre, its from there i was getting some great stuff on cd like the Apples, speedometer, the fantastics with Greg on keys of course, the baker brothers and one of my faves Is Dave McKinney's "flow Dynamics"
Greasin The wheels is a killer cd, a must have for any die hard raw funk fan.
when did you first get a D8B and why?
Well things took off really quickly and within a couple of years I’d pretty much stopped playing the trombone and was writing and recording for tv and library full time. i needed a studio at home so
In 2000, I moved to a new house and set up a proper studio space, the centrepiece being the Mackie D8B (which had been out for a couple of years at this point) so that and a Protools TDM system.
Q, Did you stick to the stock 2.03 software ?
No, when I got the D8B I remember upgrading to V3 and then the final V 5.1 software.
Q, Did you ever visit the D8B forum?
Yea it was a really good, very helpfull with contributors like Dan Worley and Mike Rivers and I learnt a lot from the posts made there.
Q, what was in your D8B ?
My board was fitted with 4 Adat cards hooked up to Protools, the obligatory Apogee clock card, and just a single stock FX card.
In use I rarely did any mixing on it - I did all that in the DAW. I used the D8B as a kind of giant monitoring patch bay, headphone mixer and control room monitor.
Q, did you have any problems with it?
It was rock solid. I turned it on and off via the power switch everyday (never even bothered to shut it down via the board!) and did not have any problems with it other than a couple of slightly sticky faders until around 2015 - so that's 15 years solid use, pretty much 6 days a week!
I’ve never been scared of opening up computers and although I know very little about electronics, I know that its pretty straight forward to swap out cards and cables etc to fix an issue, and that, as well as reading through the posts on the D8B database forum, was pretty much my method of keeping the D8B running. I ended up with 3 surfaces and 2 computers cannibalised to keep my one running!
Q, Allot of guys have now gone over to flash drives, did you get that far ?
Oh yea, my original hard drive died - I originally swapped this out for another spinning drive but later changed over to using a flash drive - well worth the effort.
Q, I have not made the switch yet, i will look into it.
It seems your D8B has had allot of use, did you have to replace any parts ?
Yea, eventually my original computer refused to boot the desk fully so I got a complete replacement for it.
Also i had a worn out talkback button which I replaced. Of course they were also bust on the other boards I bought but you can use buttons from elsewhere on the desk - you just end up with a different colour. Tip - you can rub off the legending (mute / select etc) with a scouring pad!
I had a mic pre blow. It left quite a burn on the circuit board so I simply swapped the whole board out.
Q, Christ all that effort keeping it going my hat off to you, you had you moneys worth no doubt, what made you change ?
The killer was ending up having lots of stuck faders. I don’t think its an issue with chips on the fader packs (I’ve seen forum posts about replacing them but its hard!) because if you change around their positions on the desk, supposedly dead faders start working again. I changed over all the ribbon cables as one of the Mackie repair centres say they’ll replace ALL cabling in a D8B before even attempting to fault find as they are prone to oxidisation and bad contacts, but this didn’t solve it either. I even swapped out the main MCU boards to which the fader packs connect, but I just couldn’t find a fully working combo.
At this point it needed a techs expertise to fix it and I just couldn’t afford the downtime or the risk of further developing issues, so it was finally retired!
Q, A shame but In fairness the poor thing had done allot of work, so what did you replace it with ?
Yea it had and then some, I replaced it with a Neve Classic75 analogue desk and although obviously much more expensive, it’s massively streamlined my workflow. I now no longer use external racked preamps and EQ’s - everything is straight to hand and properly metered which makes recording a band so much simpler.
Q, So only a slight upgrade then haha, What was Your overall opinion on the D8B while you had it ?
Well I’ve seen people criticise the D8B's sonics on various forums so I think its worth giving an opinion on this. Posts by various high profile ex-users said that the sound of the monitoring sections was poor and it got me worried!
My desk was always externally clocked from an Ardsync Nanosync clock originally, and then an Apogee Big Ben simply because I always had lots of digital devices - the desk, Protools and its interfaces, and various digital reverbs, delays and other outboard units. I always monitored through the desk using the speaker switching to switch between monitor sets - Auratones, PMC AML1’s and PMC IB1’s.
So I ended up acquiring a super high quality outboard monitoring unit made for Townhouse Studios mastering. Well guess what - the difference was minor and the effort of integrating this thing into my workflow probably wasn’t worth it - the D8B was in an Omnirax Synergy workstation and it didn’t give me much room to add computer keyboards, mice and controller surfaces etc. I wonder if these guys had unfairly associated the desks monitoring section to Mackies Big Knob product without there necessarily being any similarities whatsoever?
I hardly ever used the mic preamps - only in the early days when I ran out of outboard preamps. I did however have synths, record decks and other outboard plugged into the line ins which I used all the time. All my external pre’s were recorded through Apogee AD/DA 16X’s straight into ProTools, or maybe via the Ampex MM1200 24 track tape machine I had. I had an Endless Analog Clasp to make using the tape machine with a DAW much simpler, but when the company folded I decided to offload all my tape stuff. The old machine room in my studio which had the tape machines (also had an ex BBC Studer 2 track), computers and D8B power supply is now a much more useful vocal booth!
Keeping your eye on levels and checking the signal is a real chore when using racked pre’s directly into the DAW - using a console is just so much easier. I used to have a Focusrite ISA 430, 4 original Focusrite ISA 85110 modules, SSL, Pheonix Audio, Chandler TG2, Neve 1081, TLA PA1 tube and Telefunken V72 pair's racked. I’m now well over swapping around preamps to see what sounds best in any situation. I pretty much just use the 1073’s in my desk - they sound great and the mic choice has far more of a baring on the sound than the preamp does.
Q, so what outboard gear have you kept ?
I’ve still got a fair bit of outboard. Compressor wise I’ve got couple of 1176’s, a Distresser, a couple of Neve 2254’s (there's also another two in my desk), an SSL bus clone, a DBX 165A and a rack of 4 Calrec CL1170’s which are similar to the Neve’s. Also got a Manley Massive Passive, a CLM Expounder Dynamic EQ (quite rare) and a Lil Freq for EQ’s, plus an EMT 140 tube plate and an AKG BX20 spring for reverb.
Q, what mics are you using ?
Mic wise I’ve a Neumann U67 (80’s re-issue), KM84, and a few U87’s, Coles, B&W, Reslo and Beyer ribbons, a couple of CAD VX2 and a Korby Kat 4 tube mic.
I moved over to using a Behringer Powerplay digital mixer system for a bit which allows each musician to set their own monitor mix. In practise it takes a while to set these things up when the musician isn’t familiar with them, and the headphone amps in them are pretty average. So I’ve now gone back to using the 2 headphone mixes in my desk when possible - exactly the same as i did on the D8B!
Q, What Tracks were done using the D8B ?
As I said earlier I mainly tended to use the board as a patchbay and monitoring device. The only full mix I did on it was a Groove Armada live DVD. I was working on it with their live engineer Sam Parker, and he was more comfortable working with a desk than a DAW.
But In the early days I didn’t have enough external pre’s to record with so the desk pre's would have been used on toms, under the snare, hammond leslie etc. - anything I considered wasn’t in dire need of the extra girth a coloured preamp can impart! This would have been the case on Atmosphere’s Old School Classics - the first full funk / soul / disco library album we recorded, the first Sound Stylistics album ‘Play Deep Funk’ and the Super-Phonics album ‘Interstellar’. The tracks I did for The Brand New Heavies album ‘Get Used To It’ and also Grandmaster Flash’s ’The Bridge’ would also have been done this way. By around 2010 I’d amassed a fair bit of outboard and so the D8B was just on monitoring duties by then.
Q, what was the last project you did on the D8B ?
The final project I worked on with the D8B was Right Said Fred’s ‘Exactly!’ album last year. By this point I was never sure it would start up in the morning! I’d placed an order for the Neve but in the 6 months it would take to build and deliver it, I decided to ditch the D8B and just use the DAW and an external monitor controller. This was a safe option - it worked, but it got really frustrating not being able to control monitoring levels while recording in the same way as you can on a desk, and I was so happy to get a console back again.
Q, What are you up to at the moment ?
I’m currently mixing live tracks recorded at Abbey Road for Right Said Fred’s new deal with Spotify. I do bits and bobs for Ward Thomas who are local to me, including recording vocals for their track on the Roy Orbison and Royal Philharmonic Orchestra album ‘A Love So Beautiful'. I’m still involved in writing lots of library stuff for Universal - our Big Horns albums did really well over the last couple of years and one of the tracks has just been used in the remake of ‘A Star Is Born’ with Brad Cooper and Lady Gaga.
]Q, And the future ?
As far as the future’s concerned I’m just gonna carry on in me own sweet way! I’m a writer first, but I like doing odd gigs for other people just to keep myself sane and take things out of my comfort zone a little.
Jason, Thank you very much for your time, i wish you all the very best for the future.
And please keep me posted on any gigs you play in the NW, Ohhh go on then... i might even buy you a beer.
Cheers
Chris
LINKS...
Unit 4, Taylors Yard
67 Alderbrook Road
London
SW12 8AD
Tel. +44 (0)20 8673 5050
Mob. +44 (0)7590 195629
AIM vinylizor@mac.com
http://www.vinylizor.com/
http://www.soundstylistics.com/
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Heavy-Riffs-Cr ... B00U9HRBF6
