stevebrownphoto.co.uk
Steve Lawson
Steve Lawson
Terry Tyldesley
Steve Lawson by stevebrownphoto.co.uk
Steve Lawson
Steve Lawson is a hugely innovative and influential bassist, described as one of the most gifted solo bass players on the planet. He is also a music educator and social media guru. Steve has created an amazing 10-album series, Fingerpainting, of live improvised shows with Daniel Berkman that he recorded himself. A double CD of highlights from the albums has just been released. He gave us some incredible insights into the work - how it began, the gear he used for playing, and the mixing and mastering afterwards. If you’re in the US you can see Steve play this month, as he is performing a series of concerts in January.
stevebrownphoto.co.uk
Steve is a true creature of the digital age - relishing his independence, a twitter guru, and making the most of artists’ tools ranging from Bandcamp to multi-track live recording.
‘Fingerpainting’ - a 10-album live project of compelling music - is a mould-breaking venture, and we wanted to know how it came about. Very organically it turns out and it started off when Daniel Berkman and Steve met at a gig.
We did this warehouse show in San Francisco, and we met, we set up and we were just getting a sound. There was a blend, particularly with the Gravikord which is this amazing electrical Kora instrument that he plays, which I’d just never even heard of before. He’s quite possibly the world’s leading exponent of it. He had a couple of synths with him and it was just apparent that something magical could happen from this, and we just looked at each other, and went, we’re not going to play solo are we.
They recorded their first ever shows together in 2012 and the following year in 2013 played another eight gigs in California, mostly house concerts. Steve had the idea of putting it all out as a ten album set.
Steve’s style is very fluid and atmospheric with shades of ambient, pop, electronica and jazz, combining to make a warm and mesmerising sound. The recordings of their concerts show how he and Daniel seemingly effortlessly intertwine.
It sounds like a really great studio recording and so I don’t want to break that spell. I’m OK with people being a bit confused by it and going, ‘Really? This is live? This doesn’t sound live’.
There is a very definite soul to the aesthetic of it, it’s not icy cool, it doesn’t sound like it was designed by committee to sound hip like Café Del Mar at six o clock in the morning on Ibiza.
Singer, musician and producer Artemis was key. She organised the tour and also performed some of the time, with Steve describing her contribution as “fabulous”. Improvisation was at the heart of all the concerts.
I’m always surprised by the beauty of it, by the way that ideas coalesce, by the way that whoever it is that I’m playing with brings something to what’s going on that I wouldn’t have possibly conceived of, and Daniel’s possibly the pinnacle of that. I have a sense of awe at what he does to what I bring. So I’ll throw an idea at him and all of a sudden the harmony has shifted, a groove has appeared. He listens.
It can get quite playful, we’ll start trying to throw each other off, and it goes backwards and forwards. There are influences that sneak into it that are drawn from so many different kinds of music, so many different cultures and so many different bits of our experience. And that’s heady stuff, there’s a real adrenaline rush.
House concerts afford you a sense of space and a sense of postive anticipation from the audience that is about the least pressured environment in which to do stuff like that, you feel like you have the permission of the audience to amaze them.
The fact that it was all recorded live, meant embracing things from a performance, that wouldn’t get through in the studio process.
The vocal tunes on the second gig, you can hear there’s talking at the beginning of one of them. After we’ve started playing, you can hear someone talking and I’ve left that in. And there’s a guy who coughs a bit later on, so I’ve put a delay on it so it goes off into the distance. So we can be playful.
Steve being an independent artist and using the latest technology gave them huge freedom.
Even ten years ago we couldn’t have done this, there was no mechanism by which to release eleven hours of beyond-CD-quality recording.
There’s a 24-bit FLAC thing as well as MP3 so we’re going considerably beyond CD fidelity, and putting out this amount of music. We’re able to remix it and mash it up and so at the end of all this Artemis will be able to put out a vocal record, which is a compilation of all the vocal tunes on it, and sell it and make money for herself on it and do whatever she needs to do with it.
And if she wants to overdub on it she can, because we own all the rights, so we can let anybody do what they need to do with it, without having to go through publishers.
So we can be friendly and fun and infectious with it by letting people take it and sharing. But again so much of that is down to what Bandcamp has made possible. As a mechanism for sharing, listening, discovering, buying and forming relationships around music. I don’t think there’s ever been a platform that does that anywhere near as well as Bandcamp. Not even close.
Steve Lawson
Steve’s unique rig for performing and recording live, has evolved over the years. He talked us through his current set up and how he used it on the Fingerpainting project with Daniel Berkman.
I started trying to get away from having all of my effects stuff in a single series chain, ages ago. I got into the idea of putting the loopers in the effects end, and return on a mixing desk. I started out with a little Behringer desk, which I then traded up to a Mackie 1402, and I had that mounted in a mixer rack and that was in the top of it for a long time with two Lexicon MPX-G2s and two Gibson Echoplex Pros.
I had this massive rack but it gave me a lot of routing options, so I could have my bass going through it but I could also put whoever else I was playing with through as well.
This first incarnation had some drawbacks though.
I couldn’t do overseas gigs with it, partly because the Mackie desk is single voltage. There’s no way of taking a Mackie desk to the States or vice versa, which is just ridiculous. But I couldn’t have taken the rack anyway, there was no way I could have flown it, because it’s huge. So I’d wanted to get some sort of digital switching matrix for a long time.
MOTU UltraLite Mk 3 Hybrid The heart of it, really nice EQ Read More
After talking to other musicians, Steve went for a MOTU Ultralite Mk3 Hybrid with USB and Firewire, and some great features.
You can use it standalone, so I don’t have to have it hooked up to the laptop. If I’m doing a gig where I’m on the train and I can’t take the laptop, or my laptop breaks, or whatever, I can still play. The MOTU became the heart of things and it’s 8 in, 10 out. So I can have everything routed in different directions. It also has really nice EQ, a zero-latency EQ reverb and compression built into it so just sticking a vocal mic in the front I can make my £30 PG57 (Shure) mic sound amazing, because I spent the time to EQ it.
It adds this layer of versatility, but it also means that because my bass signal goes into my Lexicon, that has all the pedals in the effects loop but that then goes back into the MOTU which then sends to the Looperlative LP1 which does all the looping.
Looperlative LP1 Three pairs of outputs, the range of options is huge Read More
The Looperlative has three pairs of outputs, so I have three separate channels that come back. Two of which are basically the same but it just means they get recorded onto different tracks.
The third output goes to my Kaoss Pad, so I can post-process things in loop. So once I’ve got something looped I can then send it to the Kaoss Pad and do crazy things with it. Or I can use the looper like a delay. I can set up a very short loop with the feedback down, so it’s basically functioning like a delay pedal, have that feeding through the Kaoss Pad, and then it just becomes part of my signal path. The range of options is huge.
Korg Kaoss Pad KP3 I can do crazy things with it Read More
If someone just landed you with this set up and went, here you are, here’s your new bass rig, or guitar rig or whatever, it would be overwhelming. But because this is 20 years of development, of me changing little things and going oh I wonder if I switch that pedal, or if I change that controller, if I repatch to there. And then taking 8 months to learn how the system works and then going OK, here’s a thing I can improve. I’ve never gone out and upgraded everything wholesale.
The Lexicon processor I use, the MPX-G2, they stopped making about 7 years ago. But I’ve had it since 99, 98. I’m not one for changing gear for the sake of it, I use things until they stop, until I find something that’s smaller, that does what I need it to do.
But the MOTU is the heart of it all, and does mean that everything I do, I just have to fire up an empty project in Reaper and hit record. And that’s an amazing view. It means I never miss anything, because it doesn’t cost me anything to set that up.
Lexicon MPX-G2 Rack-mounted guitar multi-fx unit Read More
This new version of Steve’s setup is highly portable.
We’ve got it down into an SKB flyer rack case. It’s funny, once I’d got all the gear I needed, I became obsessed with luggage, because it was like, how do I carry all this stuff, I need the best way of carrying it, I’ve got the sound I need, now it’s just portability.
So that was the system. Daniel’s rig was coming into that just on two channels, because I’m such a channel hog. I had five, he had two, and one was vocal. But his sound is so well refined and he’s got a little mixing desk. The Gravikord, the synths, the ukelele, the Wave Drum (Korg) and the HandSonic (Roland), are all submixed before they come to me.
The other advantage of him coming through my system like that is it means I can loop him as well. At that point I have to have the laptop hooked up as well. Obviously it’s there for recording but I have to have Cuemix running, which is MOTU’s mixer interface, you can just mute and unmute channels to a particular send. So I can just send his signal through to the Looperlative. Which is lovely.
I’ll pick a piece where I decide I’m going to loop him - I don’t always tell him. There’s one on Accidentally On Purpose, the second gig we ever did together that came out as the first album. The last track on that, I looped the two of us together, a sort of 1970s Miles Davis groove, and you hear where the loop kicks in because it switches from stereo signal to mono.
I’ve actually got the Looperlative wired up to mono at the moment. It runs in stereo but I just found it more convenient to have it in mono. You don’t have to worry about sync cables between different loop boxes, because syncing things via MIDI is a nightmare, especially if you’re going to start editing and messing around with things the way that I do. If I’m looping both of us then it’s just the internal clock within the Looperlative that holds everything in time. It doesn’t need to be external.
Steve Lawson Terry Tyldesley
Mixing the 10 album series was a mammoth task, but the key to it was how the material was recorded live, and Steve soon set up a system for handling the tracks.
So what I’ve got is for each gig I have 6,7,8 channels of sound. On some of them one or two of those will be completely blank so I’ll just look at the waveform and go oh that loop wasn’t used at all so I can delete that channel, there was no vocal on that so I can delete the mic channel.
I whittle it down to that, edit the beginning and ending so I’ve got the arc of the show, and then I will often add a kind of maximizer plug in to the two main outputs. One of the things that I do which is actually normally considered a bit of a no no in the mixing-mastering-producing world is that I mix and master inside the same app, at the same time.
I don’t produce a stereo file and then master it, all of my mastering happens on the stereo bus before mixdown. All the mixing is on individual channels, so I’ve got the bass channel and then Daniel’s stereo pedal and then each of the loops as individual things. I process those and occasionally, I would chop my bass part into separate sections and move them onto separate tracks so I can process the melody parts differently from the bass parts. I can do that with automation and reverb. I can also just draw a curve that controls the wet/dry signal of a particular effect so I can add compression to certain points of it.
For compression I have a fantastic plug in made by Blue Cat Audio called the MB7. M for monster, B for bollocks, seven for… which is a multi-band mixer. So it means that if I’ve got a mono channel with a lot of stuff going on it vertically, a lot of low frequency, high frequency stuff.
I can split it into bands like you would with a multi band compressor and pan each of those bands in a different direction. Like a Christmas tree panning effect in order to create some sense of space within what would otherwise be a single mono track. I use that a lot on the loop channels as a way of placing things on the stereo fill but keeping bass at the centre. That’s really useful.
Occasionally I will add subtle delays to things or the odd bit of spatial stuff. Sometimes reverb. If there’s a particular sound I’ve used that in the Lexicon didn’t have much reverb on it, I might add some at post production stage. I’m trying to remain as faithful to the original as possible.
Sometimes Steve has to fix things that have gone wrong.
On Towards The Sun, there was a bit in the middle where the Looperlative went funny and it just turned into a sort of drill noise for about 10 seconds and then went back to the loop again and then did it again a little bit later on. So I edited that out, but it didn’t feel like the edit in any way compromised the integrity of the piece, it didn’t feel like I was adapting it or chopping bits out, it felt like it was returning it to the original intention that technology had messed up
Any edits I do have to be consistent with the story of what’s going on. It’s not that I feel that it would somehow compromise the integrity of the music, because the music just needs to be as good as it can be. But it might compromise the integrity of the story if I suddenly was to chop out ten minutes because it was boring in the middle.
The improvisation and risk-taking are absolutely exhilarating for Steve and Daniel.
A lot of the photos you see of me on the gigs I’m grinning like a Cheshire cat because it’s the best fun ever.The second track on Accidentally On Purpose starts out as a sort of funky electronica piece and it ends up as this beautiful pastoral ambient electronic thing, because we come to the end of the bit that sounds like Daft Punk and this beauty emerges from it. We didn’t plan it. But I do have the option to fix things, and that’s the other thing I couldn’t do if it was just a stereo file.
If all I had was just a stereo feed that I was taking off an analogue desk and just recording it like that, that drill sound would have had to stay there, or we’d have had to ditch the tune. So we do get a fair bit of leeway. I can fix individual notes if something’s gone wrong or if it clips at a certain point. Part of the reason why I haven’t left any applause in on any of the songs, is because the rest of it doesn’t sound like a live recording.
Another thing that’s amazing, across that amount of playing there are so few moments when I ever had any wavering sense of oh god this has gone terribly wrong. There are occasionally moments when I wonder where we’re going to go next, and every time, without fail, Daniel would produce something else, something would come out and I would be just floored by it.
Because of that affordance, that luxury you get in a house concert, there were tunes that were very drawn out, that we could never have done in a rock club. The tune Towards The Sun, you could never have played anything like that in a club. It takes far too long to get to where it’s meant to be in rock parlance. But the journey is just as important. If you’re listening to that on headphones it takes you on this lovely languid relaxed journey through this big ambient passage and then the rhythm starts to appear and then it takes a bit of a left turn about two thirds of the way through.
One of the things I find most enjoyable about playing with Daniel, we do those kind of handbrake turns in the middle of songs that normally require very clever writing and very intense rehearsal and we manage to do them, time after time in improvised music without it derailing things.
Steve’s key mixing tools are Universal Audio UAD plugins and a UAD-2 Satellite for extra processing power.
Universal Audio UAD-2 Satellite I can use different tape speed for different tracks Read More
In order to use UAD plugins you have to have a chunk of UAD outboard. Just about all of the plugins that I use are UAD, and I save them in sets so I’ll have a bass sound that the maximiser brings up to a sensible level, there might be a nice compression or EQ.
Part of the reason why the recordings sound as beautiful and warm and studio-like as they do is because there’s an emulation of a Studer A800 tape machine in there. I can make it sound like we recorded the whole thing on 2-inch reel-to-reel.
I have the ability to add colour to it, and malleability - I can even do the bass part as though it was recorded on an old reggae record and the Kora part as though it was recorded on a modern jazz record. I can use different tape speed for different tracks, different instruments on the same track, and that’s nuts, that’s completely insane. It’s such a ridiculous luxury.
I can add, manually, compressors and modelled SSL desks and because I’m doing it all at home I have the time to do that, I’m not paying cash to be in a studio in order to use all that kind of gear.