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The db of David Bottrill:
At any given instance in time, David Bottrill partakes in one of
three activities. He is either submerged in the realm of slumber, routing
signals on a recording console or is seated in an airplane high above
the ground. In fact, he travels so often that the next time you gaze
up at the sky and see a plane scrawl across it, he just might very well
be inside it. And where would his destination be? A place with a recording
studio no doubt. And on an aeroplane, one can sleep.
From
an early age the native Canadian found himself in the intimate work
habitat of musical vanguards Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. He was not
only responsible for skillfully operating world-class equipment, but
was also forced to push his own creative envelope.
A few short years after his indoctrination into the studio he relocated
to Real World studios in the UK, where he worked on such notable albums
as Peter Gabriel’s So, Passion and Us. Bottrill is renown for being
diverse with a forte of applying his techniques to a wide range of artists:
liner notes in albums by King Crimson, Clannad, Tool, Nusrat Fateh Ali
Khan and even Kid Rock immortalize his moniker.
His exceptional talents as engineer, producer, programmer and ace
of spacious mixing keeps him from staying put musically and geographically,
as he constantly shuttles back and forth from his decade-plus home base
in the UK to locations across North America and Europe. This is perhaps
the reason why his verbiage remains free of infiltration from British
colloquialisms. Well, almost. At times he is heard referring to a console
as a ‘desk’...
The blueprint that depicts Bottrill’s entry into the domain of
wires and microphones traces back to the dawn of the ‘80s in Hamilton,
Ontario - a modest-sized blue collar Canadian city known for its skyline
plumage of industrial smokestacks. “It’s a curious
story,” begins an energetic Bottrill. “I grew up in Dundas
[a bedroom community outside of Hamilton] and, like most people, I was
unsure what I wanted to do with my life for the most part and tried
a lot of different avenues, including going to Mohawk [Community] College
for a Business Administration diploma. I never actually finished [the
program] because two personal and significant events occured that kind
of woke me up to the fact that I wasn’t really heading down the
right path.”
The year was 1983. Bewildered in a premature version of a mid-life crisis,
Bottrill decided to seek medicinal refuge in the ever-secure world of
music. “I was always a guitar player and in a bedroom-basement
band and I was always interested in trying to do something with making
music. My girlfriend at the time said her uncle had a recording studio
in Hamilton and said to go look if there was something there for me
as an opportunity. So I went to Grant Avenue studio and her uncle was
Bob Lanois [co-owner and brother of producer/engineer Daniel].
The first time I walked into that studio, having made an appointment, and looked at the control room and spent a little time there I thought, ‘Well this is a pretty fantastic thing to do!’ They didn’t have a job for me at the time but said I could hang out to learn. So I spent the day doing odd jobs - washing windows and so on to make money so I could go in at night and assist at making coffee, sweeping up and eventually I got to plug in microphones.”
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In a true existential
moment that combined both his intrusive enthusiasm and curiosity
with the chance element of being in the right place at the right
time, Bottrill stepped into a vehicle that would take him on a
life long journey. |
By 1985, Grant Avenue studio had earned the status of fame due to its comfortable atmosphere and the aura left by reputable artists that had channeled their souls onto tape there. That year the brothers Lanois decided to sell the studio, and explored many options including the possibility of dismantling it and selling off the equipment. “We felt it had a heritage and didn’t want to see the studio die,” he recollects. “We began to rip out and dismantle the board and at the 11th hour Bob Doidge [current owner] came up with the money to buy the entire studio and we spent the whole night plugging it back in. Without any prior experience, what I ended up doing was finding the way the wires had been bent into each connector and tried to line it up again - it was very funny.” Having been once again blessed with a continuous electrical current running through its wiring, Grant Avenue ended up as Bottrill’s official place of work for the next few years. Eventually, he became promoted to official conductor of the studio’s MCI console and JH-24 tape machine beginning with the recording of Roger Eno’s Voices, which was followed by avant garde producer/guitarist Michael Brooks’ debut, Hybrid.
West Meets East Meets West…
The second step in the evolution of David Bottrill, the engineer, involves British Airways and Peter Gabriel. In 1986, Daniel Lanois asked Bottrill to fly to England to aid in the recording of Peter Gabriel’s ground-breaking album So. The session was taking place in a cow shed near the town of Bath. This session was the first where equipment and time were unlimited, thus allowing everyone’s creativity to run rampant. “At the end of ‘So’ [Dan Lanois and I] were supposed to do something with the Psychedelic Furs, but at that time they didn’t have the songs written yet.
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Dan had just spent a better part of one
and a half years getting songs out of Peter [Gabriel] for ‘So’
and he didn’t want to go through that process again,”
bares Bottrill. |
Bottrill explains the friendly clash between the two giants. “Peter likes to take much time to get it as right as he can because he has a lot of things on the go that distract him from writing lyrics. There was a time when Dan got so upset with Peter he ended up nailing the door shut from the inside of the studio where Peter was writing lyrics so he wouldn’t be able to leave to make another phone call!”
The faltering Psychedelic Furs project posed a question mark that lurked over the immediate future of Bottrill’s career. “Dan didn’t have any more work for me and he suggested I either stay here in England and look for more work or that he would help me find some back in Canada. I decided to stay.” By making that bold and fearless leap, Bottrill quickly ended up working for Peter Gabriel. He accompanied on the subsequent So tour not as a live sound engineer, but as his keyboard tech. The choice led Bottrill down a passageway which soon led him to help develop a concept called Real World, an edifice in which he deeply immersed himself for nearly a decade.
Situated in the village of Box near Bath, the idyllic Real World recording facility was the brainchild of Peter Gabriel. He converted an old mill into a hi-tech shangri-la for musical luminaries from around the world to record at. The Real World concept also grew into to the Real World recording label. Gabriel is a pioneer in incorporating obscure unconventional and unique instruments into his own music. Influenced in part by ‘world-music’ artists, he felt that the rest of the world should be enriched and exposed to this wide spectrum of music too. Sadly, without such a label, most of these artists would not be heard outside of their own domain. Initially the studio was armed with the equipment dismantled from the cow shed. “Peter had an SSL desk and two Studer A-80 [24-track] machines. One [of the Studers] was customized with electronics built by Colin Broad. It could have been a revolutionary machine except for the fact that it didn’t work very well. Like an SSL, you could set up a gate on the output of every channel because each channel had one built in it.
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It was there that Gabriel’s
eastern-influenced, instrumental breakthrough album Passion [1989]
was executed as the label’s flagship release. The album was
conceived specifically as the soundtrack for director Martin Scorsese’s
The Last Temptation of Christ - an acclaimed and stunning feature
film depicting an alternative portrayal of the life of Christ.
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Bottrill had to innovate in a way to make sure things would work.
Unexpectedly, he wound up validating the virtue that extols music as
language unto itself. “The most important thing at the time was
to make sure the musician playing in the studio was feeling their most
comfortable in how they were able to do their performance,” Bottrill
explains. “We’d get them into our good-sized control rooms
and turn it into a performance space. They couldn’t speak English
very well a lot of the time so communication was really important. We
had to get Peter’s musical point across. We would have to use every
communication technique available. Sometimes it was using handsigns,
or we were pointing. Anything like that is easier when you’re in
the same room. We record almost everything in the control room. We were
trying to make sure we could communicate and you could look at someone
and that would make as much sense as it would trying to talk to someone
on a talk-back mic. Giving a look does a lot more than a mic with headphones.”
In order to make this feat technically possible, Bottrill conferred
with the studio builders and made suggestions as to how the control
room should be constructed for such occasions. “We would also modify
things, like being able to change the absolute phase of the speakers
so when you’re recording with a mic you could put them out of phase,
and it helps to cancel out more of the sound when the rest of the track
is in.” The 48+ individual tracks used to build Passion involved
more than just an organic process. He quickly and methodically learned
how to maneuver the incorporation of MIDI sequencing and sampling technologies,
which at the time were still in infancy. Fortunately, the technically-inclined
Bottrill had a working familiarity with programming Linn Drums and Emulator
IIs and IIIs back during his tenure at Grant Avenue. Vastly employed
for Passion was the MPC-60 Fairlight as well as software-based systems
such as Performer and Cubase. Complexities were inherent due to the
larvae-like stage that the technologies at during that time period.
“Usually
there was up to 64 tracks going on at any time that mainly involved
peripheral programming. It was a lot more of a process to do it back
then than it would be now. These days everything is done through Logic
Audio and Pro Tools. Now all you do is plug in a hard disk and there
you go. It’s a lot easier.”
When listening to the end product, one is enveloped by a sense of spaciousness that is a result of Bottrill’s keen sense of microphone placement and atmospheric mixing. “It was definitely an education on learning how to record different types of instruments. All of a sudden I’d be presented with an oud, kementché, or a mazhar and I’d have to figure out where the sound came out of it and how to mic it. It opened up my ears to the new styles of music that I would never have an opportunity to hear otherwise. It was a real education.” Passion is a prime specimen of Bottrill’s deftness at blending and mastering the art, science and politics of music recording - a skill that he lends to every project. The disc also functions as a quality reference vehicle for many of today’s top producers and engineers. It is no surprise that his name is credited directly on the disc itself, which is highly uncommon for record companies to do. By doing that, it made Bottrill’s name synonymous with craftsmanship.
Immediately following the completion of Passion, work would begin on another seminal and highly personal Gabriel album, US. The Lanois-helmed production spanned over two years as Lanois cyclically went back and forth between Us and U2. The venture was perfectionist and gargantuan in scope - it requires a dedicated article unto itself - occupying two 24-track machines and a 32-track digital machine that often ran with various other computer-based programs.
“It was possibly the most intense three years of my life to date, and encompassed some of the most involved recording sessions I have ever experienced. It was the culmination of my career with Peter.”
