Gareth Jones
Recording Erasure, Depeche Mode & Other People's Songs
Tuning in to BBC Radio 1 in the '70s; Dancing until dawn in the '80s and '90s to Madness, Erasure, Orbital, and Depeche Mode; Getting into Future Bible Heroes, Ornithology, and Gus Gus in the new millennia.
If Bronski Beat, Pizzicato 5, Diamanda Galas and any of the above musical endeavors sound familiar, you've been listening to the quality production work of engineer/producer Gareth Jones all along. Exciter, "People Are People" and Other People's Songs were big hits, too, but this London-based studio great isn't resting on past laurels. In fact, time seems to be compressing for him the longer he records and remains at the leading edge of new music and evolving technology.
"Ornithology was so long ago," says Jones of his work with the fascinating drum 'n' bass project in 2002 that centered on bird samples taken from a popular BBC show. "More recently I've been working with Maximillian Hecker, Lomax, The Mountaineers, Interpol, and Howie Day, as well as more of my continued work with the 'grandfathers of electro pop,' Erasure and Depeche Mode."
Synthesizers For The Masses
Jones, who started out as a radio engineer at BBC, has been closely associated with the evolution of the Depeche Mode and Erasure sound for 20 years. His extensive gear list has, like the sound of those two bands, evolved with each new technology leap Gareth embraces from behind the board. The Roland 100M Modular System, Akai S-3200 sampler, multiple hardware effects racks, and Revox G36 2-track have been replaced by Reaktor, Reason, VST plug-ins, and BIAS Peak and, if gear lists are indicators of where an engineer is coming from creatively, we can certainly expect more great sonic tracks from him for years to come.
"I'm almost entirely software-oriented now. That's very exciting for me," says Jones. "It keeps me very mobile, and I find it somehow very creative keeping it all in software. The only hardware I own now is my Nord Modular but even that's a software synth with a hardware controller. I got involved with Peak ten years ago and it's been a constant companion with me ever since, it's an essential part of the arsenal. I shove VST plug-ins across my edits in Peak quite usefully."
Peak was a big part of Jones' work with Erasure's hit single "Solsbury Hill" released earlier this year. Vince Clarke, the iconic synthesist/composer who started Erasure after being a founding member of Depeche Mode, absolutely loved the popular Peter Gabriel solo record. He and Erasure vocalist Andy Bell decided to add their version of the catchy tune to Other People's Songs, a collection of covers including other songs by Buddy Holly, Phil Spector, and Cockney Rebel. Jones captured various component sounds for many of the riffs and melodies during an ambient recording session in Clarke's kitchen that he then transformed with Peak into the hit single's main synth theme.
"The synth in that was composed from a found sound and it went straight into Peak as soon as it was recorded. I then started cutting it up, processing the sounds, and preparing the samples to play as melodies. I always use Peak for sampling and whenever I make ambient recordings. For some reason I always put 'em straight into Peak. When I'm out recording things with my Minidisc I never think to do stuff like that straight into a DAW."
Peaking 'Round The World
Gareth's Minidisc, like his laptop, has seen plenty of mileage. In addition to working and living in London, including the legendary Abbey Road Studios and Olympic Studios, Jones has recorded, produced, edited, looped, mixed, and remixed his way around the globe over the years on sessions in Iceland, New York, Santa Barbara, and throughout Europe. Peak and the software equivalent of a house full of synths, effects, and samplers have been along for the ride, as well, ever since the advent of computer-based recording.
"I'm always creating sounds by cutting up my own recordings," he continues. "I think it's always a great thing to catch a sound in the real world, be that recording my own drums in the cellar to, you know, horses riding down the street. I use Peak for processing those samples, of course, and for when I extract audio from the occasional sample CD or to rip my own CDs to make copies for the bands, copies of the demos, or anything at all to do with extracting audio. That's three things I use Peak for exclusively, but then again, I also use it sometimes for tidying up and mastering finished mixes I've done. But mostly Peak is handy for dealing with samples, I'd say that's the place I use Peak the most when I need to effectively cut and process my samples."
In addition to BIAS Peak, Jones' current gear list includes Emagic Logic Audio; Reaktor, FM7, B4, Absynth, and Battery from Native Instruments; Propellerhead's Reason, Recycle, and ReBirth; Arboretum Hyperprism; Time Designer from SonicWorx; TC Works Mercury-1; the GMedia/M-Tron Mellotron; and PPG Wave 2.v from Waldorf. He's also looking forward to installing his new Peak 4.0 release and some of the new tools to be found therein.
"The G-Force Mellotron is great software, and their Oddity is a great emulation of the ARP Odyssey that's up there with Arturia's new Moog Modular soft synth," says Jones. "And Peak 4, which continues the BIAS story with Audio Unit support, will undoubtedly continue to be an important part of my toolkit as I make the move completely to OSX. You could say I'm BIAS-ed."
By Sari Kimmelman