Pro Techniques from Speech and Arrested Development

By Randy Alberts

"Music used to be a timeless expression of one's soul! The inner examination of that soul was the thing that inspired us, the thing that took us higher, the thing that reflected the better part of what society could be, what we should be! What happened to that music, my brothers and sisters?!" — Speech's opening oratory from "Brought to You by (Music and Life)" on Spiritual People.

"Thank God for the world being so big," says songwriter, vocalist/rapper, turntablist, and genuine good guy Speech about the overseas success of his solo CDs. "I'm really happy that there are other tastes beyond what we have in the States, but I do think we're getting back on the creativity bandwagon here once again."

Speech's continuing role as the "Life Music" driver of that wagon has led him most everywhere since the influential Arrested Development ("Tennessee," "People Everyday") broke up in 1996, a band the Fugees, the Roots, Eryka Badu, Lauryn Hill, and many neo-soul movement devotees still tip their mics to today. Now that A.D. has reunified, released Heroes of the Harvest, and is touring in full once again, Speech can refocus on Spiritual People, a hip-hop, soul, reggae, alternative, and folk-funk solo album he released in Japan two years ago that's gone gold. (He recently sweetened the disc a bit before its September 2002, U.S. release.) Speech's large solo music international following, initially a surprise to him, belies the limited stateside radio play his positive message gets on today's cookie-cutter American radio playlist. What does that say about what we hear over here?

A Simple Love of Life
"It tells me we're spoiled," says Speech, "that we're a fast food and fast music society used to having it 'our way' and not looking beyond what's here. What gets played on the radio overseas is so different because there are a lot more people from different cultures listening and buying music together. Their commercial radio stations sound more like our college stations do here in terms of taking creative chances, especially in Asia."

Speech's own Vagabond Productions is this speakster's vehicle for developing new groups, releasing his own records, and participating on movies and the assorted cool project. He's working with Nadirah, El Pus, and Lucas for Vagabond; has performed on soundtracks such as Malcolm X and Boomerang; and contributed two tracks to the world-unifying 1 Giant Leap CD/DVD project, including "Braided Hair" with Neneh Cherry, the Mathahala Queens, and a Dennis Hopper voice track on the DVD version.

DigiZine caught up with Speech during some downtime between his ongoing funk tour with Victor Wooten (Bela Fleck) and continued touring with Arrested Development. He lives in the small farming community of Fayetteville, Georgia, outside Atlanta with his wife, son, daughter, and The Podium. The latter is Speech's well-equipped "backyard studio" that sports a Pro Tools|24 MIXplus system running on an Apple G4 with four 888|24 I/Os and an HUI on hand.

Speech enjoying what he hears at the console with mixer Jonathan Wyman.

"Spiritual People was the first time we've ever used Pro Tools so I was really fired up to be able to work this way creatively," he continues while referring to Jonathan Wyman, a producer/engineer from Portland, Maine, who mixed the record. "I come from the old school of a bunch of guys with arms stretched all over the place doing mixes. Since my Neve doesn't have automation it's been really cool using Pro Tools because all those moves are now automated. We also used a lot of the plug-ins and hardly touched my two big outboard gear racks for this record."

Speech likens his use of Pro Tools in the creative process to his avid love of photography and multimedia collage making. "I like to capture moments and bring pictures home from places I've been, such as South Africa and my trip into the Zulu territories with Nelson Mandella. I'm not that great a photographer technically but people like what I see through the lens. It's the same way I achieve my music vision with Pro Tools, so I tend to leave the Pro Tools technician stuff to Jon. I plan to work with him more; he's really cool."

Pro Technique 1 —
Using SansAmp to compensate for the occasional bass blind spot
Wyman was called in to edit and mix Spiritual People, though he didn't need to edit a thing engineer Ari Newman had originally tracked with Speech. After routing the "hard drums" (kick, snare, and toms) through a stereo buss to two stereo aux faders, the first thing the two did was look at the sine wave bass line for "It's a Challenge for Me." It sounded just right on Speech's big Westlake Audio speakers but dropped out entirely on the little Yamaha NS-10s.

"I could hear the low end [when] soloed, but in the track it just dropped off and disappeared, and compression wasn't helping," says Wyman, who, in addition to Speech, has worked with Tony Visconti, Jeremiah Freed, Luther "Guitar, Jr." Johnson, and producer Beau Hill. "It just wasn't translating to our smaller systems, so I slapped the [Bomb Factory Sans Amp] PSA-1 on it to create enough harmonics and grunge and tone shape it just right to keep the bass right there on the big and small playback systems."

With Bomb Factory's plug-in in place, Wyman typically begins by rolling off the plug-in's treble control and pushing the bass until he starts feeling the low fundamentals. Then he adjusts the Punch control, usually to around 75%, to fine-tune the low-end grunge.

He also notes that all he usually does with a well-recorded drum kit is add some extra "squash" to the stereo aux fader to get the kit pumping. He normally doesn't add cymbals and hi-hat to the same subgroup in order to avoid any erratic pumping, particularly with the hat, but sometimes that works for him, too, especially when he wants to give the crash cymbals what he refers to as "a British pump thing." Be-have!

Pro Technique 2 —
Single-note horn swells with TC/E Trimmer
A catchy reverse horn swell Wyman created just before the outro in Spiritual People's title track couldn't be easier to create. Just grab any single-note sample you can, reverse it, and time-stretch to taste in butting the swell up to any point in a song you'd like to emphasize.

"Speech really liked this one for being more dramatic and pushing the song into the outro from the breakdown," continues Wyman. "I just lifted the short attack of the first note in the song's horn part, used the AudioSuite Reverse plug-in to get it running backwards, then used Pro Tools' TC/E Trimmer, which works in tandem with the AudioSuite Time Compression/Expansion plug-in, to stretch it into place. We thought about doing it elsewhere in the song but decided it was more effective the less it happened."

Wyman explains that Speech and he work on feel and rarely think in terms of parameter settings, percentages, and such when it comes to fitting a newly mangled loop into a track.

"With that sample, it was just a matter of getting it to feel this thing swelling in from nowhere and 'telegraphing' what's about to happen in the outro," concludes Speech's affable engineer. "The TC/E Trimmer is great for this because you don't enter in numbers, you just stretch out the waveform using its visual interface. I just dragged it out to where I wanted it to come in and boom. It fit perfectly. Of course, this can generate some serious artifacts if you push it too far, but I think in this case that actually worked to our advantage. TC/E Trimmer made the reversed horn part a little grainier and weirder so that the real horns sounded even bigger when they came in."

www.speechmusic.com
www.vagabondworld.com
www.thissoundsgood.com