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DELVE: JAMES RAND - Studio disruption & mixing Sega Bodega’s ‘Kepko’ with James Rand

Added 2023-01-25 17:00:05 +0000 UTC

In this Lux Cache interview series, we talk to innovative creators in the experimental music production space to discover the integral creative and practical aspects of their work. For this chapter, we spoke to mixing engineer & producer James Rand on his innovative studio engineering practice behind his production for God Colony and credits with Alice Glass, VTSS & more - all the while sharing an exclusive look into the mix engineering behind Sega Bodega’s 2022 single ‘Kepko’.

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James Rand in 'Top Secret Studios' based in Forest Hill, London.

LC: How do you incorporate unconventional sound design techniques into your workflow to push boundaries in the engineering of experimental electronic music? Can you tell us about a particularly challenging project you've worked on and how you approached it to achieve a unique sound?

JR: The biggest challenge with what I do is building an intimate understanding of the goals of the artist and producer that I’m working with. I have techniques that I lean on regularly but rather than making my mark on the work I’m much more interested in discovering new ways of listening and being open to unconventional ideas from people who have their own take on how art should be. Practically, things like Reverb Offer enormous amounts of context to whatever is being treated. It could make a synth sound far away or a vocal sound cheesy or a preacher sound authoritative or a guitar part obscured or just be used so the sound doesn’t feel too cold and isolated.

With Beatrice Dillon's workaround album, there was a specific decision to never use Reverb unless it was an overt effect. Despite there being a bunch of very talented live musicians performing on the record with traditional sounds, Beatrice wanted the music to exist in a space where the computer always won. No “wigouts”. Everything had to be gated and sober.

Mixing is all about this for me. It is making a thousand decisions that contribute towards the objective truth in the work.

LC: Your work spans a range of artists and sounds, from production for artists such as FLOHIO & Mykki Blanco to engineering and mixing work for experimental artists such as Alice Glass, VTSS and Sega Bodega. A common thread between these artists seems to be an almost punk-like ethos towards sound, genre and compositional approach. How do you define the "sonic identity" of a particular artist or project and what steps do you take to capture it in your work? Can you discuss a time when you collaborated with a musician or artist to bring their vision to life, even if it deviated from industry norms?

JR: As a producer, I’m still trying to figure that out! Historically with a lot of the God Colony records, I’ve always liked to try and bring the feel of the most cutting-edge weird-ass club records to pop artists. “Fights” that we made with FLOHIO back in 2017 started life as me trying to program a beat to sound like “Bruce - Steals”. A lot of work from that time was done with me just trying something out. There’s not much production philosophy before 2020 other than just trying to make things that I enjoy listening to. I’m actually taking some solo time right now to relearn the studio a bit and figure out what flavours and techniques I want to offer next. I’m excited by new technology but a lot of new music leaves me quite cold and I’ve just been listening and thinking and learning every sound that every synth in my room can make.

As a mixer, the sonic identity arrives from the artist. I just have more specific tools to bring their vision to life and have made it my Business to bring the latest techniques from the pop mixing heavyweights to outsider art.

LC: How do you approach working with vocalists and vocal performances in your production and engineering work? Can you discuss a particularly challenging vocal session you've worked on and how you were able to achieve the desired results?

JR: All singers are different. With most, I usually ask for them to run through the whole song once or twice to begin with. This gets me and them accustomed to it and gives me a chance to get my gain staging right at the preamp, de-esser and compression (I try not to EQ on the way in). At this stage, most want to start recording line by line which is fine. I find that the best recording sessions are usually when the singer is at their most confident with their own writing.

Most problems are more psychological rather than technical but a few good things to try are:

If you feel you’re not getting enough Detail in the words of the recording, ask the singer to over-exaggerate their lip movements as this improves intelligibility and enunciation in a recording.
If it’s too bassy they are too close. 150hz might be seductive in isolation (warm etc…) and if the arrangement is very empty this might be great but on most things, you will end up having to cut this. Get them to take a step back.
If you need more energy then get them to clench their fists and stand on their tip toes. Sounds mad but it’s worked with quite a few people I’ve worked with. Something about the whole body being alert I guess?

LC: Your production work with Thomas Gorton under the God Colony alias often infuses a magnitude of different elements, from industrial sounds, dark rap atmospheres and experimental dance music rhythms. How do you approach mixing and mastering electronic music to ensure it sounds cohesive and dynamic on a variety of playback systems? And how do you navigate that balance in creating a polished final product while preserving the raw, experimental elements of a track?

JR: Good translation on a mix involves listening to it everywhere.

I start all my mixes on Yamaha NS-10s which provide superb levels of truth in the mids and super fast transient response. Once it’s sounding good on there, I flip to my Neumann KH310s with sub and flip between those two playback systems for a while. If it’s a bass-heavy track that also needs to work on the radio I will often excite the bass with some kind of saturation like iZotope Trash 2, Soundtoys’ Devil-Loc Deluxe or Thermionic Labs’ The Culture Vulture.

Then, I’ll take a mix home and check on my phone speaker, my AirPods, my kitchen Bluetooth speaker and my Hi-Fi. Then I’ll finish the mix off the next morning usually in headphones.

Some of my client's music could be described as raw and experimental but it’s all designed to be played somewhere else other than my room, we just have to figure out where it needs to live to make it work as best as possible.

Production duo God Colony members Thomas Gorton & James Rand.

LC: Has your deep dive into the mixing and audio engineering world made an impact on your production work? If so, how?

JR: Mixing definitely makes you think about the final thing from the get-go. I produce electronic music in Ableton Live and have a template with every synth and hardware set as a send so the room is open to anything I want to try. One of the features of this setup is that you cannot use any plug-in that incurs latency as it will knock all of the gear out of time. This is very helpful for me as it stops me from getting too meticulous with sounds too early. If this kick drum doesn’t sound right then honestly just pick another one. Selecting a good sound will beat and tweaking a bad sound any day of the week.

Mixing a lot of music obviously exposes you to a lot of influences and production tricks which is great but the most useful thing I’ve found is that it also empowers you to see the moving cogs in a successful bit of work. I’ve no desire to make music like Sega Bodega but it’s intellectually and artistically fulfilling to See how he’s constructing that work. A real privilege.

Top Secret Studios in Forest Hill, London - run by James Rand & Raf Rundell.

LC: Can you describe your studio space in Forest Hill and how it informs your creative process as an audio engineer and producer? How do you optimise your studio environment for inspiration and creativity, and what are the go-to pieces of equipment and software you integrate the most into your workflow?

JR: I’m on my fifth studio now, and I think this one is the one where I might’ve finally nailed it. I absolutely loathe patch bays and so when the Antelope Orion 32 came out a few years ago, it seem like the perfect solution to me. Finally, I could have every single synthesiser drum machine and effect plugged into dedicated input and output, without having to reach for cables or compromise, the number of things that you can record.

This integrates into three templates across Ableton and Logic. There is a production template, a vocal recording template and a mixing template. Overall my mixing is 90% in the box. Go-tos include:

Fabfilter Pro Q3 and Pro L2
Waves Renaissance Compressor and RVox
Soothe2 and Spiff
Pulsar Massive or Acustica Purple
Uad 1176 or CL1B
Liquid Sonics Seventh Heaven
BX Townhouse
BX Digital V3

There are lots and lots of plugins I use but these are my absolute faves that appear in every mix.

My hardware is probably more production based in that it is mostly synths and effects. I bought a digitally controlled patch bay made by flock audio last year, which is brilliant as it allows you to multiply any signal from an effect and send it to every other effect in the room with zero latency. I have one setting called ‘neve to everything’ which will take the output of my neve channel strip and send it to every effect in the room. Incredible fun for working on vocal effect stacks or just getting weird on things that would be otherwise mundane. How else are you going to find out that the kick in the Moog Chorus is exactly what the track needed?

Ultimately, the whole thing is built on speed. I pride myself on patience with gear and love sitting with a cup of tea and an old drum Machine manual on off days but when heads are in the room the idea needs to be tested and assessed quickly.

LC: How do you balance the use of analogue and digital tools in your production and engineering work? Are there certain situations where you prefer to use one over the other, and how do you make that decision?

JR: It’s all colours on the picture really. I’m never gonna get a plug-in that sounds like my H3000 (not even the still brilliant h3000 native) but similarly, I’m never going to get a hardware box that does what soothe2 offers. If I get a mix that has been recorded at a sick studio with hot players and the vibe is amazing, I’ll be adding light touches with hyper-specific digital tools. That said if I get a flat recording then I with certainly experiment with lots of analogue bits to try and inject some colour back in.

LC: Can you discuss your process in engineering an immersive and dynamic soundscape, giving an example of something you have worked on recently?

JR: So here is a look ‘Kepko’ by Sega Bodega which was a fun job from late 2021.

Salvador is one of my oldest clients and we started working together on my girlfriend’s kitchen table whilst she was at work back in East London around 2014. I was teaching him mixing to begin with (even though I wasn’t particularly good at it myself) but I did help him with some of his very early work. Over time I started to build rooms and he began bringing music in with him singing and the rest is history.

Salv’s rough mixes are excellent and provide a verbatim document for how he wants it. Every time I move anything on his tracks these days, I am A/bing his rough to make sure nothing by way of the story has been put out of place.

Mix session of Sega Bodega’s Kepko in Logic Pro X

PROCESS

Usually, the track is prepped by my assistant where tracks are named, colour coded and markers are paced and esses are gained down. I make an exception for Slav who just bounces in place a handful of things with plugins he knows I don’t have and then he sends me the session. It’s always in good order usually and so I will begin by getting to know each stem and doing some very basic corrective EQ with pro-Q3 and usually some mild compression in the box. I’ll also send some elements to my hardware early on and print them back into the session.

DRUMS

Track view o of Sega Bodega’s Kepko in Logic Pro X

It looks like a lot but most of this is Salv. What will be me is all the pro-Q3s, The Spiff on the drum bus, the RX950 (an amazing and very cheap emulator of the old aka sampler converters) BX SSL, the Transient Designers and the UAD dbX 160. The SPL transient designer and the dbx160 are both designed to do the same thing in pushing the transient out of the Rattle Thud and Snare amen. A/Bing it again now, it's comic how little it's doing (less than a dB on both).

The Spiff on the dum bus is moving more though. Just 24% of this aptly titled preset

oeksound’s Spiff plug-in settings used on the drum bus.

BASS & SYNTHS

This bass sounded a tiny bit flat when I got it:

🔊 KEPKO BASS DRY.wav

So I sent it to my Neve 8801 channel and then paralleled the output to my culture vulture distortion and Eventide h3000 and made it this:

🔊 KEPKO BASS PROCESSED.wav

Then the new signals are summed to a bus and treated with a touch of compression and EQ.

Similar hardware stuff goes down here

🔊 KEPKO GLITTER LEAD DRY.wav

Only with h3000 and reverb this time. I’m using a doubler on the H3000 and a CXM 1978 reverb which sounds a lot like the Lexicon 224:

🔊 KEPKO GLITTER LEAD PROCESSED.wav

WHITE FLAG SAMPLE

Salv does lots of very creative sampling and in this track, he sampled his own cover of ‘White Flag’

Sega Bodega & Trustfall - White Flag (Cover) - YouTube

He has cut it up and done all kinds of pitch fuckery which sounds great.

Automation of ‘White Flag’ sample in Sega Bodega’s Kepko inside Logic Pro X

This is such an integral part of the track and is made up of a tonne of tracks all bused into one bus (63 VOX FX). I knew he would have spent a tonne of time on these tracks so I opted to only touch the bus and automate that so it wouldn’t be difficult to get it back to how he had it.

I effectively added an amazing panning plug called Brauer Motion which I automated.

Wave’s Brauer Motion plug-in used on the vocal FX chain.

Then I mastered this bus using a Purple EQ to boost the tops and bass (aka a smile curve):

Acustica Audio’s ‘Purple2’ EQ plug-in settings.

Adding a tiny bit of EQ:

And then a limiter set not to add any gain but just to push down super loud peaks. These little 1.5dB nocks are the most it is doing.

Fabfilter’s Pro-L 2 and Pro-Q 3 settings.

Obviously, the Pro L-2 is a great master limiter but it’s also an amazing problem solver if you just want to knock down the loudest parts of a very dynamic signal, hold ALT when you raise the gain and it will compensate on the output.

VOCALS

This is another one where the hard work had already been done and I just wanted to treat the bus.

First off I had 1176 totally smashing it with a bit of room on the attack to give the syllables some contour. It’s a busy mix and his vocals are heavily treated so I wanted them to cut above the beat.

Universal Audio’s 1176 REV settings.

Then some soothe to treat a lot of the intense tops (I would say that Salv de-esses like a PRO before we get to this so this isn’t as bad as it could be)

oeksound’s Soothe2 plug-in settings used on the vocals.

Then a tiny touch by me. The track felt like a strobe light so I added this Tremolater to the vocal at only 25% to make it flicker 16ths alongside the hi-hats

Soundtoy’s Tremolater plug-in settings used on the vocals.

I’ll normally spend a day on my own getting it to a good place and then Salv will come and see me for a day and then after that, we will finish it about 5 more times over the next 24 hours with him texting me whenever he hears things that bug him. This went straight off to Heba Kadry and was mastered a few hours after the final mix was approved.

LC: How do you stay up-to-date with the latest technologies, techniques, artists, producers and potential collaborators in the industry? Are there any resources or communities you rely on for learning and inspiration, and which artists/engineers/producers do you pay attention to?

JR: I did go to college to learn audio engineering and of course, I learnt valuable stuff like using an in-line console and what phase is but I never met any “great” producers or engineers and this lack of access naturally meant that things took a lot longer to get going for me. With that in mind, I would say that the fact that you can sign up to Mix With The Masters and be seeing a video of Tom Elmhirst mixing Rolling In The Deep in front of you is fucking valuable. Okay, he’s sat in a crazy analogue room that costs more than your parent's house but you can replicate the theory of what he does to Adele’s vocal with 3 UAD demos and then it’s a trick in the arsenal. I’d recommend anyone who wants to improve their game give that site a go for at least one year (there is always a good Black Friday deal FYI)

Online advice is definitely a double-edged sword but I’m happy to listen to anyone who’s touched good art. Other good engineers to search on YouTube with a pen and paper handy include Andrew Schepps, Josh Gudwin, Jayden Joshua, Tony Massarti, MSM.

Also, check Dan Worrall on YouTube if you want to go deeper into topics like phase and dither. He’s dry as a bone but a great communicator. Producers I look out for and rate are Justin Raisen, Bullion and Fred Again (a lot of people give him shit but the guy’s tunes have a modern pop sonic that I really rate). As for artists… everyone on our new label, ‘Crack Copies’…. Projects en route from Strategy, Gorgers, Mother MaryGold and The Coward.

LC: How do you see the role of audio engineering evolving in the future, particularly in the realm of experimental electronic and alternative pop music? Are there any changes you want to see in these worlds, either in the artistry or the industry side of things?

JR: AI is on the way and whilst its conventional attempts as writing whole songs leave me cold, it’s bound to become a big resource for stems. Something about all those images of people with 7 fingers suggests it will do similarly fucked up things for sound which will be great once somebody with a clue has a go. Industry-wise, I’m not the man to speak to but I subscribe to everything that Elijah says in this podcast… Really really worth a go if you release your own music or are trying to get something off the ground.

Not A Diving Podcast with Scuba - #041 with Elijah | Spotify