Chains of Chains...

One of the things that makes Jeremy a fun collaborator is his militant insistence on running virtually every sound through his seemingly bottomless arsenal of analog effects. If it can alter a sound and doesn’t have AES/EBU I/O, he owns at least one example, if not a pair. Stereo, doncha know…

The only way in which he and I really differ in this regard is in the means with which we apply effects, not the quantity, although quantity has a quality all its own, of course. He likes to print his analog effects, while I’m more of a “let’s insert an H8000 or Lexicon 300, or some of my ten million plug-ins while it’s coming off the tape” kind of guy. (Point of order: RT60 instrumentation is 100% “real,” and our recording medium is analog tape, but when we’re mixing, we’re alowed to use plug-ins and digital effects.) One of our early arguments was based around the fact that I’m not a fan of phasers, while he most definitely is. I won that one, only barely, and I think he still slips in the occasional pass with the SPH-323 when my attention is elsewhere. Fair enough. As long as we don’t end up sounding like ELO, I can live with it.

But those differences aside, we do see eye to eye on this: every sound is more better with a heaping shovelful of effects on it. Obviously, my opinion in how those effects should be applied is heavily biased, as is his, but we agree that nothing should survive to the final mixdown unscathed by compression, modulation, delay, filtering, and reverb. We tracked a 303 for a song yesterday, and were quite pleased with ourselves when we decided to only compress it.

Me: “Man, it’s really in your face when it’s dry and loud like that.”

Jeremy: “Oh, hell yeah!”

Me: “I think a little Dimension D might make it really pop…”

I think the only reason the 303 sounded so present was that everything else in the song was burbling away in a stew of analog delay and spring reverb.

Anyhow, my Secret Effects Weapon is, of course, the H8000. It isn’t such a secret, really, but by virtue of the fact that Eventide has only made 600 or so of them, I’m one of only 600 or so people in the world to have one, which makes it the next best thing to secret in this day and age. But I’m of the over-arching opinion that, since electronic instruments are all essentially identical, the occasional circuit-bent Furby notwithstanding, effects make the sound. What’s your Secret Effects Weapon? Do you leave everything chained all the time? Or do you “design” each sound individually? Is “too much effects” like “too much Chopin?” That is to say, a physical impossibility?