Pierre Marchand (pictured) developed Wild Sky Studios with Sarah McLachlan to accommodate her album work

RECORDING FROM THE DRUMS UP
All of the albums that Marchand recorded with McLachlan after Solace were recorded at Wild Sky studio, following a similar approach. They begin with a lengthy pre-production process, with just Marchand and McLachlan sitting down and mapping out the songs.

“We get a mood and a direction for the songs, and the musicians later tap into that,” Marchand says. “Usually, we develop ideas that Sarah brings in, sometimes we write songs together. ‘Building A Mystery,’ for example, was a combination of some chords that Sarah played that fitted with a chorus melody line and some words that I had written. For Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, we enjoyed the first week of pre-production so much that we thought we could just stop there and put out a record. You can hear some of that stuff on The Freedom Sessions album, which was released two years after Fumbling. Some of the tracks on it are the result of that first week of experimentation. The rest is the live band improvising completely new versions of older songs.

“Once Sarah and I have the structure for the song,” he continues, “my drum machine, the Akai MPC60, is my starting point for the arrangements. I’ve used the MPC60 for all the albums. The 808 on Fumbling was sampled into the MPC60, because you can do many more things with the sounds in the MPC60. I try to find a rhythm that goes with the song and take it from there—I find it easier to create original drum rhythms that way. Drummers have their set of drum beats, and to play the kick drum in an unusual place may be unnatural for them. Ash Sood is really open to creating unusual things. He doesn’t mind stealing from what I come up with on the drum machine, or me editing the things he does in the RADAR. He may improvise for four minutes, and I may find one fragment of that, loop it and use it as the basis for a song.”

Marchand’s drum-centered approach manages to offer continuously fresh perspectives that don’t distract from the essence of the songs. And his methods can be original. “For Fumbling I also hired a local drummer who is legendary in Montreal, called Guy Nadon,” he says. “He’s very eccentric and funny, and a fast player. I asked him to play some rhythms, but it was sounding too much like a jazz big band, and I was afraid I could not loop any of his playing for Sarah’s songs. So I got a whole bunch of CDs, randomly chose one from the pile, gave Guy a five-second taste of a rhythm, and asked him to do something similar. He would ask to hear more, but I refused, because my idea was that he wouldn’t play exactly like the example, but just a similar tempo, feel and beat. I created three different loops in the E-mu IV from three dozen different beats, and one was used on the track ‘Ice Cream.’”

Technology and Performance
Marchand has stated that he’s “not big on sound,” and it seems true that the engineering side of the recordings is secondary to Marchand’s focus on production and performance. But the sumptuous sound of McLachlan’s recordings clearly does owe quite a bit to the technical end. Technology, Marchand feels, not only gives him the ability to manipulate sounds, it increases his ability to get great performances out of McLachlan and her band.

During pre-production, Marchand and McLachlan do a lot of experimenting with vocals and instruments as well as rhythms. “I will sometimes record as many as 20 tracks of backup vocals,” he says. “The advantage of working here in Wild Sky is that I can record her well from the start. Most of those early vocals are retained. We still try to get better vocals later on, but it seems that when there’s little on tape, the vocal is more focused. If you record a vocal to a finished backing track, it often doesn’t work. Moreover, this way of working means that everybody in the band plays to the vocal, which helps to keep them focused.”

Marchand says that one of the tools that allows him to get strong performances is his Otari RADAR system. “When I started producing,” he recalls, “I would tell a band exactly what to play. I was like a master dictator. This was in the days on analog, when it was much harder to play around with the performances after they were done. Solace was done on the 3M machine, Fumbling on a Studer 827, and Surfacing was all done on a RADAR. I love that machine. I can’t live without it. It’s made by some Vancouverites. I saw an advertisement about six months before it came out, and called them and said that I’d like to try one as soon as they had one. I wanted to be a guinea pig because of all the editing I can do with it. Flying things around, creating loops, offsetting the timing. It’s practical and great fun.

“I managed to do edits with analog multitracks, as well, using two multitracks and the 4-track Akai D4, to have slave reels and fly things in,” he continues. “But it often was a nightmare. Now I find that when the band or individual musicians come in, saying nothing is the best thing. I allow myself to get surprised by what they do. I simply put the mics up, press Record, and if they’re good musicians, they’ll come up with something interesting. I tell them that it doesn’t matter if they make mistakes. I just want them to get comfortable and play and enjoy themselves. If you saw the floor of the studio here, you’d understand that it’s not about playing things right. It’s a very cozy and fun place to work with a floor full of paint and wires, and that’s what I like. It’s like, ‘Do whatever you want, and I can fix it later in the RADAR.’ If a drum fill doesn’t work, I can just take it out or put it somewhere else. This is where technology has opened up new creative possibilities.”

Hard disk editing gives Marchand the same control over “real” audio that MIDI sequencing once gave him over synths and samplers. For Surfacing, he used the MPC60 purely for drum loops, whereas keyboards and samplers (Kurzweil K2000 and E-mu IV) were sequenced in Logic Audio for the PC, using an Aardvark 20/20 sound card. In his floating studio, he’s now using PCs with Nemesis’ Gigasampler software, “which is convenient because it takes a second instead of 30 seconds to load a bunch of sounds,” he says, “and you can have a piano sound that uses one GB of memory, and so have every note fully sampled. I have an MPC2000 and an Ensoniq Paris system on the boat, as well.”

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Reprinted with permission from Mix Magazine, June, 2000
© 2000, Intertec Publishing, A Primedia Company All Rights Reserved