The Music
I started recording music, which I wanted to sound like a silly Beatles jam session - without the stress of perfection, but of joy.
The first song I recorded was ‘A day in the life’. I was singing in the jazz band at the Béla Bartók Music School in Berlin at that time, and asked the band to join the adventure of making a radioplay. Luckily they were crazy enough to make a live recording performance with almost no experience from my side (I’d only had a one year training in music production at the Wave Academy so far). I rented an interface that had a loose connection, got some vintage mics with a generator I thought would explode if I handled it wrongly and could not listen back to the recording in the DAW for some reason.
It was a live recording with no ‘click’ and you can hear lots of sound bleeding. After some decent takes I realized the next morning, I did record something and it wasn’t too bad!
Additions on ‘A day in the life’: Tobias Tietjen on drums, mixed by Adam Dudek.
For the second recording I tried something I’d always wanted to do - explore the instrument collection of Ingo Stoevesandt. Ingo is a pianist and music ethnologist who dedicates his life to the music of South-East Asia. Ingo got many of his instruments from musician friends and instrument builders from whom he also learned the basics of playing them.
I wanted to start with the first song which was originally meant to be on St. Pepper ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. The problem with my idea was that the instruments are mostly pentatonic, so it’s not really possible to play the song on them. What we did was, that Ingo played the nearest notes possible and I transposed them later in my DAW. We used the Guzheng (an acient chinese zithar, which became one of my favourites instruments), a Saw (violin from Thailand), Sitar, Bawu (flute from China), Pi Phu (flute from Thailand), Sulings (flutes from Indonesia), Dondo (‘talking’ drum), Indian Tabla, Oceandrum (Germany), Udu (Nigerian drum), Caxacu (African tambourine), and others.
Postproduction additions: Bass was added by Tomke Zschachlitz (double bass) and Andreas Brendal (electric bass), Tobias Tietjen (drums) and I asked the Chinese Guzheng player Katerina Zhiyuan Luo to add more Guzheng, which lead to this crazy fast run at the end of the song. Guitar, vocals and production by me. Mixed by Adam Dudek. Mastered by Frida Claeson Johansson at Svenska Grammofonstudion. Listen to our Version of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ here.
Although I didn’t use a real Mellotron for ‘Strawberry’ I had the great luck to record one, thanks to Tilman Schulze! To play a real Mellotron is a humbling experience. “You cannot play it like a pianist, you have to play it like a spider,” Tilman quoted from a book. It has a loud motor on the bottom, with tapes of recorded instruments that are triggered through a spring when you press a key. If you press it longer than round about 8 seconds, it hiccups. It has a meditative feel when you play it. I used our reording for the Mellotron scene in the radioplay.
The next recording was a classical song, a symphony by Debussy. It was the song George Martin heard as a kid, which illuminated his path. I’d never recorded classical music/instruments before, so I was most nervous about this one. I asked around at the music school if students would be intrested to join a radioplay and luckily I found a great little group of young people: Timon Stemberg (Clarinette), Nathanael Sens-Schönfelder (Horn), Magdalena Humbold (Oboe), Clarisse Feliciano (Flute).
But how do you record a horn? I rented a bunch of cool crazy mics from Carsten’s store Echoschall, like the RCA 44bx, and we recorded the song as a staged studio reenactment for the radioplay. It was fun to see how these young musicians were working together without really knowing each other beforehand. Classical music seemed very interactive as you work with no ‘click’.
For the recording of George Harrison’s song ‘Within you, without you’ I luckily found Sebastian Dreyer, a Sitar and Tabla player from Potsdam. It’s different to work with a sample/plugin or to work with the real instruments. The beautiful workmanship and sound of a Sitar is mesmerizing. I could have listened for hours to Sebastian’s playing. Special thanks to Fernand Kenzler, Retox Studios, where most of the recordings took place.
Another thing I tried out was to get the feeling of John Lennon’s first demos, which he recorded while writing ‘Strawberry’. George Martin always said that he regretted not having recorded the song with just John singing and playing the guitar. He thought he overproduced the song. I recorded it with Normen Goltz on guitar who carefully found out how John played it. My voice actor Matthew Hadgraft then recorded vocals over it. I used this demo version for the first scene of the radioplay.
While I was editing the radioplay, I realized I had to record ‘The Beatles’ working in the studio together! But who could be ‘The Beatles’? I saw a post on instagram from the musician Adar Alfandari and his band. Adar has a lovely fun and quirky energy, as did his band members Matan Goldstein and Yonatan Harari, which was perfect for a silly session. Additionally I asked Tomke Zschachlitz to join on piano for ‘With a little help from my friends’.
I knew I could not record a band, and I was especially afraid of recording drums. Luckily I found Karen Dhios, a sound engineer from Argentina, who had worked in the studio with Moses Schneider (a famous sound engineer who invented the ‘Wurst’ mic setup for drums). We tried to make an reenactment of the St. Pepper album with what we had. I learnt how to mic up a drum and we used a double mic setup for the bass (U67 & AKG C414 with a brass capsule). The recording took place at the LonePine studio in Berlin, special thanks to Luke and Gidon.
I wrote three Songs for the radioplay: ‘Fluffy Coat’ , ‘Yoko Piece’ and ‘The Sneeze’ (see DELIA).
