The Bill Price Interview

The Bill Price Interview—PART 1
Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

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Is there a sonic difference between the arrow-shaped dropouts and the AGFA-shaped dropouts? Yeah, one goes [thumping noise] and the other goes [trilling noise]. [Laughs.] Quite a mess, really. What we then had to do, which was incredibly boring, was to spool through the tapes before we baked them and change all the leaders if they had anything printed on them. The first album that we had this problem on was Sandinista, which I had done myself. Luckily enough, I happened to have in my loft 15 ips playback copies of the entire album, so I was able to edit those bits in, which we did digitally, obviously. My copies were first-generation, one-to-one copies of the masters, so they edited in fine.

So at some point, you converted to digital and did the album assembly in a workstation.
Having baked the tapes, we spooled them through on a Studer A80, which as you well know has got a very gentle transport, holding a piece of that special cleaning tape over the tape to get any guff off, between finger and thumb, slowly watching it go through. And then we mastered it off an Ampex ATR-100. We didn’t go through any desk or anything. We patched the Ampex ATR-100 straight into a Focusrite Blue EQ and that was then fed into a Focusrite A to D converter. That, in turn, went to a TC Electronic three-band compressor/EQ mastering gizmo box. Then that went to Sonic Solution’s DSP system. So that was the actual cutting/mastering chain. A majority of the sound tweaking was done on the Focusrite EQ and obviously the level changes, but then we had to match it with the vinyl. Luckily, I had original pressings of all The Clash albums, both the ones I did and the other ones, which I liked, in my cupboard. We played the vinyl, on the Neumann lathe, which we calibrated, and we could see the difference between the master tape and the original vinyl. So that’s where we got our EQs from, just by listening, mainly.

Particularly on the more punk [Clash] songs, where the bass guitar was throbbing eight in a bar, the bass just seemed to hum off the vinyl, whereas it didn’t from the tape. I really don’t know what it was, but the bottom end of the vinyl just really hummed. We had to do a little bit of work on the bass end one way or another, just to get the same effect as the disc.

What you were trying to do was make the master tapes sound like the vinyl?
Yeah. It sounds simple, but a few little things popped up. For instance, where the master had been brightened up for the vinyl, it was pretty easy to establish an EQ to brighten up the guitars and the drums, but then we’d notice that the vocal would get very sibilant, whereas on the vinyl it wasn’t. This was easily explained by the fact that when the vinyl had been mastered on a Neumann lathe, the acceleration limiter had kicked in on the vocal sibilance and knocked the sibilance off without actually taking the top off the guitars and drums. We managed to find a setting on the TC which simulated the Neumann acceleration limiter in the lathe and acted as a sort of de-esser. There’s a few other things that were really interesting in the vinyl. Particularly on the more punk songs, where the bass guitar was throbbing eight in a bar, the bass just seemed to hum off the vinyl, whereas it didn’t from the tape. I really don’t know what it was, but the bottom end of the vinyl just really hummed. We had to do a little bit of work on the bass end one way or another, just to get the same effect as the disc. I don’t know if it was a mechanical-resonance thing going on with the vinyl, but we had to add something that hadn’t been there on the tape.

Revisiting this material, what’s your perception of the music? Has it stood the test of time?
It amazed me, the dates on the boxes. I’d forgotten how far ahead of its time it was. To be honest, I was astounded by lots of things. I was really impressed by the very original Mickey Foote Clash recordings, which I think were engineered by Simon Humphries. I might be wrong, but I’m pretty sure it was Simon Humphries, actually at CBS in Whitfield Street. That was the very first stuff The Clash did.

[Editor’s note: For more on Price’s work with The Clash, see next issue’s discussion of “London Calling” in our Classic Tracks column.]

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