Pro Techniques from Michael Bradford

Pro Techniques 02.01.2003

By Randy Alberts


	Michael Bradford

Playing guitar at age 6 was a blast, but for one inner city kid all that changed the day Detroit radio first aired "Smoke On The Water." Later that night Michael Bradford plugged his first bass guitar into a fuzz box he'd received for his 11th birthday and he's never been the same since.

"One day I'm playing along with them in my mom's basement," recalls Bradford, now 41 and a father of two, "and 30 years later I'm rehearsing them and producing their new album. They sound great with that classic meat and potatoes rock'n roll sound I've always been a huge fan of. There's also some down tempo songs, and Steve wrote an instrumental that is one of the prettiest pieces of music I've ever heard."

You're My Highway Stahrrrrrr!
Bradford's talking about the band and original guitarist Ritchie Blackmore's replacement in Deep Purple, the mind-boggling Steve Morse of Dixie Dregs fame. With just-departed legacy keyboardist Jon Lord coming back to join Ian Paice, Roger Glover, Ian Gillan, and keyboardist Don Airey (Rainbow, Ozzie Osbourne) for a couple of songs on Deep Purple's new album and Morse sounding as Zeusian as Blackmore ever did, even die-hard fans will be excused if they mistake this new Bradford-produced disc for one of the greatest rock albums of all time: Deep Purple's seminal Machine Head.

"Until Pro Tools|HD came along you couldn't really capture a classic sound like Deep Purple's the way people did on tape back then," says Bradford, producer, composer, arranger, solo artist and long-time Uncle Kracker and Kid Rock collaborator who's also worked with Madonna, Terence Trent D'Arby, hed-pe, and Run DMC. "The sound of a live rock band's (Hammond) B3, the ambience of the guitars, and the snap of the drum heads in a big room are now recordable with a computer because of Pro Tools|HD's transparency and fidelity. We can actually capture the sound of great old school live bands like Deep Purple now, and it sounds more natural."

And how do the boys sound?

"Until you hear Ian Paice's gigantic cymbals and 26-inch kick drum live, you can't really appreciate how much big drums mean to the overall sound of a rock band. Like a lot of British rock drummers, Ian can swing in a way that smears perfectly with the guitars, bass and keyboards to create the unique fatness of the band's sound. Listen to the way the drums and cymbals overlap with everything else in between the beats and how much it fattens everything up."

Pro Tools|HD and 'The Real Thing'
As if having a devout fan in Bradford behind the desk wasn't enough to preserve their signature sound, Deep Purple is still using the same road-stained B3 that they used on every classic DP hit. When Jon Lord recently had to step down from touring life he bequeathed his B3 to the band — originally used for years by Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac — to ensure its sound legacy continued. Bradford, recently discussing the beloved B3 in Keyboard's Dance Mix column, is more than a little privy to the organic, identifiable nature of every B3's sound.


	Deep Purple

"Don uses it now in the band and Jon will play it again on a few songs on the album. He just doesn't want to tour anymore," continues Bradford. "When he stopped touring he told them they could hold on to the organ so the band wouldn't lose its distinctive sound that it had on all those classic Deep Purple songs."

Following the release of a deluxe box set celebrating the band's 25th anniversary, Deep Purple is mounting its biggest effort in years in leading up to a summer tour coinciding with the new album's August release. Not just a silver anniversary push for the band, Deep Purple looks and sounds as good, if not better, than they did in 1969 and may just become your favorite new rock 'n' roll band all over again in 2003.

"They're all in fantastic shape," exclaims Bradford not unlike a trainer in the good guys' corner, "and Jon Lord looks like he could chop down a tree! They've never been one of those typical self-destructive rock bands and have truly always been into this for the music, and it shows."

Pro Technique 1 —
Using Pro Tools to create custom rhythmic delays
Like his first basement jam with "Smoke On The Water," Bradford has also been trying to recreate the sound of another song since first hearing it two decades ago. He's been mesmerized by the way a cut off word in Thomas Dolby's "Wind Power" repeats rhythmically and speeds up and slows down as it pans through the stereo field on Dolby's 1982 debut The Golden Age of Wireless.

"I want the echo of a word, line or noise to be rhythmic in the repeats but in a way that no echo box or software delay can ever do," Bradford says. "A stutter pattern that has its own rhythm. Back then (Dolby) would've had to sample that sound and then trigger it with MIDI to get whatever unusual rhythm pattern he wanted. Today, using Pro Tools, I can just copy a small section of that sound and paste a bunch of times to a Grid on another track in whatever rhythm I want by using sub-beats."

Directly below the track of the desired part, Bradford creates two new tracks, panned hard left right. He can then easily create very intricate rhythm echo patterns that bounce back and forth in the stereo mix, much like Fatboy Slim and BT. Instead of using a hardware or software sampler or taking up extra CPU drain, he just takes up two tracks in Pro Tools.

"Then I just put a little (Digidesign) D-Verb and 1-Band EQ to progressively take off more high end on each tap to simulate the softening of the decay in a real echo box. Then I put a slight fade on both sides of the echoes because all echoes eventually fade out, of course. You end up making very customized echoes that do very complicated things but you can do it very quickly and easily."

Bradford instructs that one should first select a small snippet of a sound file, such as the end of the last word in a verse, then copy and paste it as quarter, eighth or sixteenth notes depending on how fine your Grid resolution is set.

"I've been doing this technique for years, maybe ever since hearing Thomas Dolby do it," he says. "It's great for anything where a custom rhythmic echo repeat pattern is called for that you can't come close to creating with even the most sophisticated echo plug-in or hardware. You can't program the varying rhythms like this, and you certainly can't see and interact with each delay tap in an echo box the way you can with two tracks in Pro Tools."

Pro Technique 2 —
Using Beat Detective to lock up non-percussive parts
A project requiring more and more of Bradford's time recently called for a fast fingerpicking banjo part. The part, performed by an intermediate-level picker, needed to be tightened up a little to lock to a drum loop groove Bradford had going on in order to achieve the "campy Americana" effect he wanted for a new song.

"Banjo fingerpicking and many other non-drum parts are single-note runs that are very close together and fast," continues Bradford. "I was able to run the banjo part through Beat Detective — which broke it up into individual notes — and then I quantized it to match the loop."

Bradford says he would select one section of the banjo part at a time and instruct Beat Detective to chop up the run into separate notes. "Because it was a 16th-note pattern, Beat Detective conformed the banjo notes to the nearest 16th notes and treated the banjo part just like it would treat a hi-hat in locking it to the drum loop I was trying to match."

Who played the banjo? "I'm not the greatest banjo player, but it was me," admits Bradford. "It's for my first solo artist release. Any music part with a solid attack and notes that are single line runs or chords that are choppy will do, including vocals, so don't think of Beat Detective as just being for drums and percussion. Then at the end, I just tell Beat Detective to fill in the gaps and then crossfade between them — those being the gaps that are created if the two notes have to be a little further apart than they originally were. What used to be like going to a dentist's office is what Beat Detective now cleans up in a minute or two."