Ah, the eighties. Every record sounded like it was made in a stadium, every singer working their uppermost range until it seemed as if their vocal cords were about to leap out of their throat, every hit wrapped in a glossy package of shimmering guitar leads and silky bass.
And, of course, every snare drum was passing through a gated reverb.
Hugh Padgham is largely responsible for many of those sounds—particularly the latter— but he’s also responsible for crafting many of the greatest records of the era, The Police’s “Every Breath You Take,” Genesis’ “Tonight’s the Night,” and Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” among them.
His ultra-clean signature sound raised the bar for every engineer and producer of the era and had a major impact on the shift from the dead, close-miked records of the seventies to the open, ambient sounds of the nineties and beyond.
Padgham’s unique abilities and versatility are probably best reflected in the fact that he’s won four Grammys in four different categories: Album of the Year (Collins’ 1985 No Jacket Required), Record of the Year (Collins’ 1990 “Another Day in Paradise”), Best Engineered Album of the Year (Sting’s 1993 Ten Summoner’s Tales), and the 1985 Producer of the Year award.
Padgham’s career started at London’s Advision Studios, where he served as tea-boy (the British equivalent to a runner), but it wasn’t until he moved to Landsdowne Studios in the mid-1970s that he received formal training, quickly rising through the ranks from assistant engineer to chief engineer.
In 1978, he took a job at Richard Branson’s Townhouse studio (which sadly closed its doors only recently), which gave him an opportunity to engineer for various Virgin artists, including XTC, Peter Gabriel, and Phil Collins.
It was also at the Townhouse that Padgham first met a young bass player by the name of Gordon Sumner. . . soon to be known to the world as Sting.
A couple of years later, just as Sting’s band The Police were poised to reach the heights of international fame, Padgham was brought onboard to co-produce their massive hit album Ghost in the Machine.
We met up at his West London studio, Sofa Sound, one bright summer afternoon, where the affable Mr. Padgham, looking more like a ruffled professor than a superstar pop producer, shared his unique perspective on the evolution of record-making through the past two decades.
Howard Massey: Are you fully sold on digital recording these days, or do you still use tape?
Hugh Padgham: I’m not anti-digital per se, because you’ve always got to stay as current with things as you can. But people who grew up with analog gear can hear the difference, and there’s no doubt in my mind that analog sounds better: it’s kinder to your ears, and not as harsh.
Having said that, there’s also no question that digital now sounds better than ever before. These days I’m running all my sessions at 96k, 24-bit, and that’s a big improvement over 44.1 or 48. Of course, the original RADAR, which was 44.1, 16-bit, sounded a lot better than other machines, so I think a lot of it is down to the converters.
One thing I really miss about analog recording is tape compression, though. By using it carefully, you can actually get some 10 dB of extra level before a well-recorded transient signal like a snare drum clips.
That’s one reason that digital sounds so harsh—because you’re not getting any of that nice rounding off of the transients. So these days, I tend to do my initial tracking onto 24-track tape and then copy that into Pro Tools. That way, at the very least, my drums, bass, and guitars hit tape.
If I have the time and budget, I will continue doing things onto analog, either by premixing and bouncing tracks, or by running a second machine in sync.
However, I still never go over 48 tracks; I set that as my limit. It just gets really difficult to manage more tracks than that, especially if you’re mixing on an analog console.
Don’t forget, we used to quite successfully make records on a single 24-track machine.
How do you know when a recording is complete, when it’s time to stop adding overdubs and start mixing it?
It’s really just instinct. For me it always comes down to one simple question: “Does it sound any good?” Sometimes you run into situations when you suddenly think, “I’m not so sure this sounds good anymore.”
That’s when you realize that the last thing you added didn’t need to be there. “Less is more” sounds like a cliché, but it often is true, and it often takes a lot of effort to have less rather than more.
I actually spend more time pruning stuff down than adding things. Doing so can often require a musician to learn or evolve an altogether different part to be played, so that what was two tracks is now one track.
Every song is different, of course, but I’m always looking for ways to simplify and reduce.
I have one criteria that is probably my bottom line: is it embarrassing or not? If somebody is singing and it’s really out of tune, that to me would sound really embarrassing if you put it out on a record.
A guitar part could be equally embarrassing—the kind of thing you’d play when you were in your first band in school, when you were 13 or 14 and playing a lot of crap.
Something that goes back to the days when the guitar player was focusing so hard on getting the chord shape or string bend right that he couldn’t put any feeling into it.
Those moments are tough for me, because I find myself thinking, “Oh my god, what am I going to tell them?”
What do you tell them?
Well, I hope they’ll come to that conclusion themselves when they hear it played back. Still, I always subscribe to the idea that it’s not my record, it’s the artist’s record; I’m making it for them.
So all I can do is ask the artist, “Are you really happy with that? Or are you going to be embarrassed when you hear that in five years’ time?”
What happens if the artist is happy with a part he’s played but you feel strongly that it’s embarrassing?
I occasionally had that problem with Sting, who sometimes couldn’t be bothered, or thought what he’d done was good enough. Usually I’d just fix it when he wasn’t looking.
Of course, now in Pro Tools you can do things that were unimaginable years ago. I made a record not long ago with a singer who, frankly, was not on the ball—he’d often come in hung over or whatever.
We had the usual problem of time and budget, plus he was physically incapable of improving things sometimes. But somehow, by doing a lot of fiddling around and editing, I was able to make him sound really good.
The problem was, he thought that was all him! He thought he’d done a great job, when in reality what he’d done was quite embarrassing.
But if there’s a conflict with the artist, it’s like a conflict in any job or any aspect of life: you talk it through and either you come to a compromise or one person wins and gets their way.
People usually get over it, though. If I have a really strong feeling about something that the artist disagrees with, I’ll say, “Look, it’s your record, not mine; if you really want it to be like that, that’s fine… as long as it’s not embarrassing.” [laughs]
How do you feel the role of the producer has changed since you started making records?
The main role used to be quality control, but one of the worrying things about making records nowadays is that the concept of things sounding good rarely comes into it.
It used to be that you would run down to the record store to buy a particular new album because you knew it was going to be a work of art sonically; you’d race home and put it on the best stereo you could find and it was an amazing experience listening to it.
Sadly, nowadays, kids grow up listening to everything on earbuds. My daughter, who’s a teenager, once plugged her iPod into some little computer speakers I have and she said, “Dad, that sounds amazing!”
They were just tiny satellite speakers with a small subwoofer, but she was amazed . . . and the reason, I think, is that she had never heard bass before!
It’s almost a complete reverse evolution, really. If you look at video quality, things have evolved forward, from VHS to DVD to high-def.
But in the world of audio, it seems that things have gotten worse and worse: we’ve gone from vinyl to CD—and the early CDs sounded way worse than vinyl—and now we’ve gone to MP3s, which sound even worse than the earliest CDs.
Personally, I think the era of the disc is well and truly gone. Hopefully our file sizes will get bigger—meaning better quality audio—and so too will storage capacity.
I really hope that, as memory becomes cheaper and more prevalent, we’ll be able to restore the quality of audio.
Soon there will be massive flash drives with high bus speeds, and hopefully then we’ll be able to at least store good quality uncompressed audio. People won’t notice files that are ten times the size of MP3s if you actually have ten times the space to store them in.
Or perhaps there will be new forms of compression invented that will preserve full-quality audio. Or maybe we’ll all just be wired into a central server. The problem with that is, what happens when you lose service?
There will be caching schemes, I’m sure, and hopefully they will improve all the time as well. What lies ahead is exciting, and you can’t stay rooted in the past.
Another contributing factor to any perceived decline in quality is that budgets are shrinking, so people aren’t given adequate amounts of time to hone their sounds in a professional environment.
That’s true, and, as a producer, I find that very frustrating. These days, the budgets are so small that the only way you can make an album is to do it as quickly as you possibly can; otherwise somebody ends up not being paid.
As a result, there’s very little room for experimentation, so it’s very bad from an artistic point of view. And they’re cutting the budgets all the time— every day, there seems to be less and less available and more and more corners being cut.
Yet somehow you don’t ever hear about record company executives taking a cut in salary.
Still, I honestly don’t think it’s been economics that have been the sole downfall of record labels.
The problem is that, generally speaking, they have gotten themselves into an irreparable situation, and so they’ve become very adept at signing music that most people don’t want to listen to. That’s because most of today’s A&R people don’t come from a proper musical background.
They’re much more into trends rather than something being good. If something is on the front page of the newspapers, they want to sign it, and then all the other labels want to sign the same thing.
In fact, very often, labels sign artists just to stop other labels from getting them, not because they really believe in them. My daughter likes a lot of current music because she’s young, but she often asks me, “Why is it only old stuff that gets covered, or sampled?”
What do you think is the solution?
It’s a question of rejigging the model. The major labels still have huge overheads—huge offices in New York and LA, and big staffs to run.
But if you run a tighter ship and share the ownership of the product with the artist, if you don’t con them into thinking you’re going to be selling millions of records when you know you’re not, and if you keep the costs down, then the artist can make the same amount of money selling far fewer records.
That’s a model that a lot of people are starting to look into now.
Even in the old days, when a lot of records were being sold by people like Sting or Phil Collins, it was only because they were selling eight or nine million records that nobody was complaining.
The people associated with them were making good money—nowhere near the huge amounts of money the record labels were making, but good money—so you put up with it, just as you put up with the fact that you weren’t going to get paid anything from certain foreign territories because of bootlegging. You were just educated by the record labels into assuming this was normal.
But eventually, hopefully, those kinds of things will be policed properly, so that everyone gets paid what they’re owed.
In the old days, artists had to have a record deal because they needed that advance to afford to pay for expensive studio time and they needed the label to do marketing and promotion.
Today, people have the ability to do those things for themselves, and it has made a huge difference.
Ironically, in some ways it’s made it harder for an artist to gain recognition, because how do you get your stuff heard?
Suggested Listening:
The Police: Ghost in the Machine, A&M, 1981; Synchronicity, A&M, 1983
Genesis: Abacab, Atlantic, 1981; Genesis, Atlantic, 1983; Invisible Touch, Atlantic, 1986
Phil Collins: Face Value,Virgin, 1981; Hello, I Must Be Going!, Atlantic, 1982; No Jacket Required, Atlantic, 1985; But Seriously, Atlantic, 1989
Sting: Nothing Like the Sun, A&M, 1987; Ten Summoner’s Tales, A&M, 1993; Mercury Falling, A&M, 1996
Peter Gabriel: Peter Gabriel, Geffen, 1980
XTC: Black Sea, Geffen, 1980; English Settlement, Geffen, 1982
To acquire “Behind The Glass: Volume II” from Backbeat Books, click over to www.musicdispatch.com. NOTE: ProSoundWeb readers can enter promotional code NY9 when checking out to receive an additional 20% off the retail price plus free shipping (offer valid to U.S. residents, applies only to media mail shipping, additional charges may apply for expedited mailing services).
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