Guy Sigsworth
A single question, worth 100 points, and seconds only to answer: who was Sylvius Leopold Weiss? As expected, you failed to give the correct answer: Weiss was Germany's most famous lutenist/composer back in the day and J.S. Bach was a huge fan. That's ok, I didn't think Guy Sigsworth would know about him either...but I was wrong! In fact, the London based pop songwriter/producer is incredibly well versed in baroque music, the Renaissance, and lots more. Ah, what they do to a guy at Cambridge!
Happy to discuss his work with Seal (the singer's breakthrough album Crazy was also an early milestone for Sigsworth), Madonna, Britney and Frou Frou, the group he heads with singer Imogen, Guy is also ready to rhapsodize about art of the past at the drop of a hat. During a series of trans-Atlantic exchanges, Sigsworth described his early musical experiences, his current work, and the technology he uses.
Mix: "Who were some of your early musical influences?"
Guy Sigsworth: "I grew up in Ilkley, in West Yorkshire. There's a really twisted, eerily jolly song, “On Ilkla Moor Baht’at," which you ought to hear. It even has its own Wikipedia entry. The lyrics-about cannibalism, no less-make Marilyn Manson seem like John Denver.
"I was surrounded by classical music. There was almost no pop music in our house. My dad-a mechanical engineer-collected pianos. At one point we had three grand pianos in the house, plus a dismantled pipe organ in the garden shed. The first piece of music I remember rally, really loving was Bach's “Toccata and Fugue in D minor” for organ. I'm still completely in love with the organ-it's essentially this huge additive synthesizer, only with pipes instead of oscillators. There are so many cool sounds you can coax out of organs. I really want to feature them more in my music.
"My first musical hero was David Munrow; he made these albums of early music, featuring countertenors, cornets, sackbuts, shawms, crumhorns, rebecs, lutes, etc. I thought it was the coolest music ever. I took up the harpsichord, and started going off to early music summer schools. Early musicians are the rebels, the misfits of the classical world. That's definitely part of the attraction for me.
"I was also a fan of David Fanshawe, this eccentric composer-cum-field-recordist-cum-amateur-anthropologist, who's still roving the world with his Nagra. His most famous record is African Sanctus, but there's loads of other great stuff he's done.
"The third David in my musical life was David Sylvian, front man of New Romantic band Japan. It was hearing Japan's Tin Drum, especially the song “Ghosts,” with its spooky electronics, that made me determined to go and do something likewise. Japan had this particular approach to synthesis, which felt so right to me. Where Kraftwerk or Depeche Mode made synths go "thip", "blip", "takk" or "squelch", Japan programmed synths in the style of imagined non-existent ethnic instruments-misshapen flutes, bells and kotos; and that helped connect, join the dots between electronics and my love of early music and field-recordings.
Mix: "How well trained are you in music theory?"
GS: "I know the word "theory" scares most people. Not me. I'm always more excited by the ideas that I hope might just work in theory than the ones I already know will work in practice!
"I love Stravinsky. His Symphonies Of Wind Instruments is one of my favorite pieces of music. It's-quite literally-"pieces", six segments, all in different tempos, cut up and rearranged into a collage; the most cubist piece of music anyone has written before the invention of sampling. Apparently he was inspired by seeing the jump-cut editing in early silent movies, and he wanted to do the same thing with music. I'm not claiming to be the next Igor, but I have tried to build on his example of musical techniques which mirror film techniques. There's a definite "slow-motion" quality when sounds are pitched down, for instance; you can "freeze-frame" the whole mix into an infinite reverb; and you can do a kind of "zoom" say, by starting a sound 100% wet, then drying it out as you sweep its EQ. The real challenge is a musical version of the so-called "Hitchcock zoom" the "Vertigo effect"; I imagine sounds which are freeze-framed, but which simultaneously undergo some kind of spectral/formant change. I'll probably have to buy Kyma to be able to do it properly...
"There are other modern classical composers who've influenced me even more. I love those Steve Reich pieces where the same instrumental detail gets layered against itself until you stop hearing the detail and instead hear this moving texture. That's why we called the Frou Frou album Details. It was about taking small, detailed parts, and counterpointing them until you had this moving web of sound. Generate an orchestra out of one guitar harmonic or one viola. Ligeti calls it "micro-polyphony", although his sound world is vastly more dense and sinister than anything I've ever attempted.
"In pop songs, I'm wary of the "pad" thin -the ten-finger high-cholesterol synthesizer chord that just clogs the song's arteries. In the Frou Frou songs Let Go and Psychobabble, the arrangements are partly about me getting round that "block chord" thing with a moving texture weaving in and out, trilling-that's more to my taste.
Mix: "How good are your keyboard chops?"
GS: "I get by well enough. I have no ego about my own playing. I prefer to listen than to play, to accompany than to solo. That moment when the singer breathes in, the violinist raises her bow, and you're ready to follow wherever they lead - I just love it.
Mix: "When did you start getting involved with sampling and sound design work?"
GS: "My father had an old reel-to-reel tape recorder, and I was maybe ten when I started playing around with that. Later I had a friend who owned a Greengate DS3-the first non-millionaire-priced sampler: 1.5 seconds sampling, 8-bit heaven! Finally I saved enough money for a Roland S330-many of the sounds on Seal's first album were done on that.
"I didn't own a synth until some time later, and that has affected my approach. I'm used to shaping sounds which already have some air around them, because, at some point, they went down a microphone. I soon learned to use my sampler as a fake synthesizer, by sampling raw waveforms and shaping them with the internal filters. I sometimes treat my entire Pro Tools rig as if it's a huge modular synthesizer; I'll make a sound on Signal Generator, filter it with a McDSP plug-in, distort it with Lo-Fi and so on...
"I like the tension between the played and the unplayable, the human and the robotic, the acoustical and the impossible. Pure electronic music abolishes that distinction, unless it has vocals - the human voice caught in the inhuman grid. But I'm more inspired by, say, The Books, where there are these tiny boxes of humanity, played and sung moments sliced-and-diced in a computer. My friend Jon Hassell calls this "perforated music". I love it.
"There are emergent musical technologies which really excite me too, such as Physical Modeling. I struggled with Modalys, the Ircam program, but it takes ages to create even one blip of audio! That's why I love Eric Thibeault's programs-Tassman and String Studio especially. Eric's company, Applied Acoustics, makes fabulous instruments that are easy to just tweak. It brings back what I always loved about the Japan album-using electronics to imagine non-existent acoustic instruments.
"I also persevere with anything which says "spectral" on the tin, even though nothing I've tried is really very intuitive to use. I must give honorable mentions to Native Instruments' "Spektral Delay", the Reaktor ensembles designed by Gabriel Mulzer, and, of course, Sound Hack, though.
"As software programs become more open-ended, there's a danger that we forget the craft side of instrument design-which I think should still inform plug-in design. Think of those amazing effects pedals Roger Mayer designed for Jimi Hendrix 40 years ago. The most sophisticated of them has, what, maybe five parameters you can change? All five are musically useful, and Mayer has pre-set them to operate in musically useful ranges. A guitarist quickly learns what effect a parameter has on the guitar sound, and can quickly incorporate it into playing. I'm not arguing for retro plug-in designs, which endlessly emulate “classics.” That's very boring. But the futuristic, alien-sounding ones need to be made a little more musician-friendly."
Mix: "What sequencer/digital audio work station do you use?"
GS: "I use Pro Tools for everything. I know lots of people use other software as their front end, with Pro Tools hidden offstage at the back. I never saw the point in that. The channel and plug-in automation in Pro Tools is great. If I showed you the automation I put onto, say, a lead vocal track, you'd be scared. Aside from all the really, really careful volume rides, all the effects sends are automated in really full-on ways. EQs, compression ratios, subtle channel distortion-all these will be changing constantly throughout the song. It's got to the point where maybe 75% of what I do is now impossible to do on conventional consoles. They may sound wonderful, but for detailed sound manipulation, they're just too primitive for me. I have felt tempted by the TLA valve consoles. I'd use one either to do tracking, or to send sub-groups out for the valve coloration.
"For monitoring I mostly use Dynaudio Air 6 speakers-they were recommended to me by a laptop artist called Mileece-she has amazingly precise hearing-and I think they're great.
"In terms of mics, I mostly use a Sony C800-G or a Neumann U87 on vocals. I once hired a Blue Bottle, which was truly, truly fantastic-probably the best vocal mic I've ever heard. I'm saving my pennies for one of them."
Mix: "Do you execute final mixes in your own studio, or do you like to work in large rooms for finishing work?"
GS: "I do the best mix I can in my studio. If the artist insists, someone else can have a go, of course. I actually think mixing-as opposed to tracking-is best done in smaller rooms. Smaller rooms discourage people who shouldn't be there from hanging around! Also, if something's wrong with a mix, it's even more painfully annoying in a small room. It'll force you to sort it out!"
Mix: "Do you engineer your own projects (aside from those major label tracks you work on for others), or prefer to bring in an outside engineer?"
GS: "I used to hands-on program everything, every volume ride, but I realized that it stopped me listening. I now work with an absolutely fantastic engineer called Sean McGhee. Not only is he insanely talented, but we share a wry sense of humor, which makes all the hours spent in close proximity good fun."
Mix: "How would you distinguish between "classical," or through-composed music, and popular music?"
GS: "Well, "through-composed" isn't a good dividing line between "classical" and "pop". Every sound in Britney Spears' Toxic was put there, defined down to the millisecond, by Bloodshy and Cathy Denis. By their standards, most of Handel's music seems really loose and ill-defined."
Mix: "But aren't you talking about orchestration--the elements of adornment--rather than the structural blocks of form? Would you really argue that Who Let The Dogs Out has greater definition than the Messiah?"
GS: "Fair point. But I actually think Western Classical music-as we have understood it- is over. It’s completed its mission. It’s taken us on an incredible journey from plainsong to atonality (and back). But we’ve arrived somewhere else and we’re traveling somewhere else again. Great pianists will still play Chopin and Debussy, but, in terms of the new repertoire, we're somewhere else. There are fantastic musicians who get called "classical composer.” I recently discovered the music of Max Richter, and he's brilliant. What's exciting is that these, really, "post-classical" musicians are embracing the artifice of the recording medium, writing cool film scores and generally being modern people. The Kronos Quartet make truly, truly wonderful records; but they don't even try to sound like classical concerts with the audience noise removed."
Mix: "What musicians you've not crossed paths with would you like to meet?"
GS: "Off the top of my head, The Kronos Quartet, The Pet Shop Boys, Maximilian Hecker, Fennesz, Hanne Hukkelberg, Christina Pluhar, Missy Eliott, Pink."
A cool guy, this Guy Sigsworth. Tres moderne, but close your eyes, check out the fluttering harp line on Britney's Everytime, and just for a moment you may feel as though you've been transported back to a time when mutton was the main meal and “Greensleeves” could be heard pouring out of every window.
Appeared in Mix, January 2006
