They kind of hung them from the ceiling, gave me advice on mic types and pre-amps. I’m not an expert at capturing acoustic sound, so I had my mics set up on the piano by those guys. The other great thing about being in that studio is that there are two engineers there who are kind of experts. It’s all used on the record, but it’s not the feature. That’s where the huge rack of pre-amps and compressors and stuff is, but part of the arrangement I have there is that I have access to all of that stuff. So if I need to do serious live recording, like drums or anything (there are a tiny bit of drums on the album), then I go downstairs. That’s the great thing about my studio-there’s a commercial studio downstairs. At the end of the first track, “We Disappear,” there’s a kind of weird sound going up and down the harmonic scale, and that’s a violin bow going up and down a string.ĭo you do all of the live recording in your personal studio? And then there are some violins, as well. On this record, there are a little bit of vocals, but they’re heavily disguised. How much live recording did you do for Immunity other than the piano?
They shouldn’t be part of the same chain. It keeps the sound and the arrangement completely separate, and I don’t understand why there aren’t programs that already do that. I can have an infinite number of changes on a sound, with a whole Undo chain just for sound and a whole Undo chain just for arrangement changes. Logic doesn’t know that the sounds are being changed, so it just plays them directly off the drive.
I can make changes to them in, and those changes update immediately without having to save them. The live instruments get recorded into Logic, and then I open them simultaneously in SoundForge. We also talked with the talented producer about his love for vintage software, his favorite studio tricks, his connections with Brian Eno, his aversion to the more technical aspects of music production, and why he’ll never record over 16-bit, among other illuminating topics.
Ever since we heard the new LP, we’ve been absolutely curious to find out what kind of machines, software, and production work Hopkins put into his new album during the four years since he released the similarly excellent Insides, so we tracked him down at his studio in Hackney, East London to peek around a bit. We weren’t exaggerating in the least bit when we reviewed Jon Hopkins‘ XLR8R Pick’d Immunity album and said that the UK artist is “from a school of production that values craftsmanship over most everything else.” The fact is emblazoned across Immunity‘s eight hyper-detailed tracks, as each handcrafted layer of sound design and momentary nuance is as important to the music’s staying power as its equally well-crafted beats and melodies.