Pierre Marchand

Pierre Marchand
Producing Sarah McLachlan, on Land and on Sea, by Paul Tingen
Continued from Page 2

Dominique and Silvain Grand now manage Wild Sky

Microphones and Beyond
“I think microphones are a matter of experience and listening carefully,” Marchand says. “I get mics that I’m told are good, try them all out on an instrument, and choose the one that sounds best. I spend the next three minutes with the headphones on loudly, moving the mic around the instrument until it sounds right and leave it there. Next I get a decent recording level, and that’s where I stop. I don’t add EQ or compression or effects, although I do compress vocals when recording because they’re too dynamic.

“In Sarah’s case, I recorded her [vocal] with a Neumann U47 until Surfacing, and then switched to Neumann 149, which has a sweeter top end—I don’t have to EQ it later in the mix,” he continues. “I compress her voice a little with the Tube-Tech CL1, just minimum compression, fast attack, medium release. I have also noticed that, as time passed, I started moving the microphones farther away from the source, because I found that the more room sound I got, the more interesting or natural the results were. When I first started with acoustic instruments, I made the mistake of recording everything with the microphones right up close, and I then had to do a lot of fixing at the mix. Although sometimes close-miking can sound excellent, and I still end up with microphones in the strangest places. There are no rules, although when I asked Daniel Lanois for advice on how to get a good acoustic guitar sound, his answer was, ‘First get a good-sounding acoustic guitar.’ I suppose that’s a rule that goes for almost everything you record.”

Marchand also gets a very beautiful piano sound, which starts with a 19th-century Steinway Concert B grand piano, recorded with two Neumann 150 microphones placed right above the strings. But Marchand says that microphone placement and selection are not the areas that really turn him on. Sonic experimentation is his passion—for example, the moving soundscape behind the track ‘Black & White,’ which is “a sweeping filter pad out of the K2000. I like putting these sounds through an amp. It gives them a new life, a bit of crunch, injecting some organic feeling.”

Marchand also created an exquisite effect on “Sweet Surrender.” The rhythmic sound at the beginning that resembles a hooting car is actually bassist Brian Minato going haywire with feedback on an electric guitar. Marchand says, “I asked him to put the amp at 11 and just go for it. He learned the chords as he went along, and he filled the track up with feedback. Later, I went through it with the RADAR and found bits of feedback that fitted with the chords, and put them in places that worked. I then created a rhythm using the mutes on the Helios, and to get this idea perfectly in rhythm I programmed the sequencer and keyed a noise gate with it.”

Wild Sky Studios
The collaboration between Sarah McLachlan and Pierre Marchand goes beyond her albums; they’ve also built a studio, Wild Sky. Marchand explains how the facility came to be: “The first album we did, Solace, was recorded on a 3M 24-track, in various places, including Vancouver and Daniel Lanois’ place in New Orleans. During the pre-production for that album, we were looking for some quiet space to work and stumbled on this house here by chance. We rented it for a month or two, and everything we did sounded great, so after a year of going from studio to studio, I came back and rented this place permanently. It’s a beautiful house on a hundred acres of woodland, with a cliff in front of it and lots of light inside. It’s a good place to get away from it all and very pretty in winter. It’s owned by a painter, and I set the studio up in the painter’s studio, which has a lot of daylight. It also is a great-sounding room.”

The room can be seen on the interview video that’s part of multimedia section of the Surfacing CD. It’s an atmospheric space, lighted with candles. A 32-channel Helios mixing desk is right in the recording room. “I’ve never liked working in traditional studios,” Marchand explains. “I prefer to be in the same room as the artist all the time. I never use iso booths or recording areas; everything is recorded around the console.

“The reason is that I don’t like talkback,” he continues. “I go for performance, and communication is better when there’s not talkback and no isolation. In any case, I always record everything flat, so there’s no need for me to twiddle knobs during recording. I put up a mic, and if it sounds good, wonderful, if not, I move the mic or try another mic. But I don’t spend a lot of time trying out or putting up microphones. Most microphones here are set up permanently, and that works fine. I may change or EQ the sound during the mixing stage. Sonic perfection is not my primary aim, which is why I prefer to engineer things myself. I figure that if there are four technical people in a room, such as engineers and assistant engineers, the whole atmosphere gets so technical that it creates a laboratory mood. I’d rather have only people present who are making music, and capture that with the gear.”

The Mix
Unlike many engineers, Marchand says he actually loves to “fix it in the mix.” “I spend four days per song mixing,” he says, “because that is when I make most of the decisions. There’ll be a lot of EQ’ing going on, and I’ll add effects and edit, and there may even be some additional overdubbing. Even the song structure may still change at this stage. A song may be six minutes long, and I’ll have all sorts of ideas on tape, and then during the mix I’ll narrow things down and select all the best moments. The song may get shorter and more condensed.

“I actually really like doing things like finding the good 30 seconds of music in 15 takes,” he continues. “I like selecting the best bits and then comping them together. And, of course, I have a safeguard in Sarah. When I start a mix, I’ll simply put up the faders and try to make everything fit. Once it starts sounding like a song, I start looking at making musical changes, like edits or overdubs. Sarah is fully involved at this stage, but she will let me work alone for long periods of time, and when I’ve achieved something, she’ll come in with fresh ears to make decisions.” Another effect that’s added in the mix is tremolo. “If you hear tremolo on any CD I have produced, it’s actually board automation and a fast wrist,” he says.

Although Marchand records most sounds dry, he sometimes prints effects on a separate track to help create a mood for a song during recording. But at the mixing stage, these effects usually get erased. He then starts again from scratch to create a coherent soundscape. His favorite effects boxes include the Eventide H3000, Lexicon PCM 90 and PCM 80 reverbs, delays, echo, flanging, and most of all, the RADAR. “The solo in ‘Building A Mystery’ was created in the RADAR,” he says. “I borrowed chords from the song and placed them in a different order, and Sarah’s guitar solo, as well as her ‘oooohs,’ go into a multitude of reverse and forward modes. This took me a few hours of twiddling knobs before I was happy with this musical break. There were quite a few luckymistakes involved. I love the fact that there’s an Undo mode. This means that when I cut and paste, I can be deliberately careless. I’m always hoping that a mistake will turn out brilliant.”

Freelance writer Paul Tingen is a frequent contributor to Mix.

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