It fucks with the fabric of time
What a cool statement and wish I had come up with it - but sadly no. It was Tony Visconti in response to David Bowie's question about his brand new piece of gear: the Eventide H910 Harmonizer.
I haven’t written anything technical for a few weeks and thought it would be a good idea as we are currently recording the new Starlite & Campbell album - Starlite.One - and Suzy and I are marinating ourselves in new sounds.
This article isn’t just about the Eventide Harmonizer - more of that later - but about producing interesting and engaging records.
It’s all about the sounds
From the very beginning, musicians have sought to create new sounds by developing alternative instruments. More recently they have taken traditional instruments and modified the sounds with effects.
Joe Meek with The Tornados and Telstar, Les Paul and Mary Ford with their homemade multitrack tape machines and echo devices, Geoff Emerick and Sir George Martin experimenting with The Beatles, The Beach Boys with Good Vibrations, all the Pink Floyd records and every 50s SciFi movie you can dig up. Roxy Music, David Bowie, Robert Fripp, Radiohead - the list is endless.
These artists used a dizzying array of instruments and techniques, but they all have one thing in common - their love of manipulating time.
Now we are not talking about Dr Emmett Brown of Back to the Future fame or Doctor Who whisking the likes of Thom Yorke or David Gilmour off on some time travelling adventure but about ways of adding richness to their music using time-based effects.
But, what are they and how do you make them?
Reverberation
We all sound so much better when singing in the shower. This is an example of reverberation (reverb) which is caused by sound bouncing off walls and hard surfaces in a very complex way. The sound comes out of your mouth and then arrives at all the different bathroom surfaces, bouncing back to your ears at different times.
People for years have tried to emulate this on records and in live concerts. Even to this day, studios have specific rooms, known as echo chambers, to create reverb where you place a speaker in an acoustically live room (similar to your bathroom) playing back say a vocal track with microphones to pick up the natural reverb which is then mixed into the final track.
When recording at Abbey Road Studios in London the Beatles extensively used the studio’s legendary echo chamber to add a natural reverb to their recordings.
Since the 1930s musicians and recording engineers have tried to electronically emulate the sound of a bathroom or concert hall by using transducers on massive metal plates and in guitar amplifiers, spring reverb tanks. Take a listen to Dick Dale to get an idea of what a spring reverb sounds like.
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Echo
Echo is a little different. Imagine a gunshot in a mountain range. The sound travels a long way and is then reflected back from the hard surface of a mountain back to your ears and you can hear distinct repeats.
Early on echo (delay) was emulated in the studio by the innovative use of tape recorders, lengthening the distance between the record and playback heads by running tape all over the control room, around microphone stands or other bits of furniture. Slowing down the tape machine also has the effect of making the delays longer.
John Lennon didn’t particularly like the sound of his own voice and insisted he had a slapback (a very short delay) on his voice most of the time. Take a listen to Instant Karma! (We All Shine On) for an excellent, pronounced example of the effect.
Robert Fripp, along with Brian Eno, developed his ‘Frippotronics’ sounds based on two Revox tape machines to make delays and repeating loops of sound. Using this technique, he went on to work with both David Bowie (Heroes and Scary Monsters), Blondie, Talking Heads and Peter Gabriel.
One Of These Days is a fabulous example of innovative use of the delay effect and features Dave Gilmour and Roger Waters using a Binson Echorec echo unit on a bass guitar to create a rhythmic pulse.
The Binson is an electromechanical device which records a sound onto a magnetic rotating drum. Varying the speed of the drum and/or the placement of the playback head on the drum causes the delay. The length of the delay can be varied and the balance between the original signal and the delayed signal can be adjusted.
Live and in the studio, I use a 1974 Maestro Echoplex which is a similar device but works by recording the original signal to magnetic tape with a moveable head picking up the signal from the tape and playing it back.
Both these units still sound fantastic but are sometimes temperamental and troublesome but are both time-based effects.
Digital
The examples above use natural rooms and electro-mechanical devices to create delay and reverb, but in 1971 Eventide Clockworks Inc. came up with the DDL 1745 which was a fully digital delay and later in 1976 German company Elektromesstechnik (EMT) - which was famous for making original plate reverbs - brought out the EMT 250 digital reverb.
These devices changed everything. Gone was the need for specific rooms to create the effect or huge slabs of metal plate, tape recorders and springs as it was all done in the box using electronic emulations.
It fucks with the fabric of time
The device that Tony Visconti was referring to was the Eventide H910 Harmonizer.
The hand-wired, pre-production prototype of this legendary device was unveiled at the Audio Engineering Society (AES) in 1974 with the production model released soon after in 1975.
This totally blew people’s minds because it allowed you to change the pitch of a note in real-time: if you put 30 seconds of audio in, you would get 30 seconds out but at a different pitch. Awesome.
Also, combined with the machine’s delay and feedback tools, the Harmonizer created a new universe of far-out effects with which musicians and producers could bend, shape and expand sound in ways never before possible.
Prior to this, artists like the Beatles would lower the pitch of a record or vocal track by slowing down a tape machine, but of course, as you slowed the machine down, the length of the piece would increase.
The first H910 customer was New York City's Channel 5, utilizing it to downward pitch shift I Love Lucy reruns that were sped up to create room to run more advertisements. Speeding up the reruns had increased the pitch of the audio, and the H910 was able to shift that pitch back to where it originally had been.
Frank Zappa and Jimmy Page added it to their guitar processing rigs. Producer Tony Visconti used the H910 to create the snare sound on David Bowie's album Low (1977), as did Tony Platt on AC/DC's song Back in Black (1980).
Chuck Hammer in 1979 used it as an integral part of his guitar synth rig on tour with Lou Reed and in 1980 with David Bowie.
Another popular application was to use two H910s slightly detuned with a small delay. Notable users of this twin Harmonizer effect included Eddie Van Halen, who used it for his trademark guitar sound, and Tom Lord-Alge, who used it for the vocals on the hit Steve Winwood song Back in the High Life Again (1986).
Recognizing the popularity of this application, Eventide later recreated it as the ‘Dual 910’ program in the H3000 UltraHarmonizer released in the late 1980s. The H910 was also one of Eventide's first devices to enter the world of film, and was used on the voice of R2-D2 in Star Wars. - Wikipedia
The way this device works is grounded in the delay effect but is really (REALLY) complex using algorithms based on short-time Fourier transform (STFT). If you are totally bonkers and want to know more, start with this paper by Théo Royer: Pitch-shifting algorithm design and applications in music.
Tony Visconti
If you don’t know much about the legendary New York producer, read his book - Tony Visconti: The Autobiography: Bowie, Bolan and the Brooklyn Boy - it’s a fascinating and engaging read which gives his whole story. In the context of this article, however, it’s his work with David Bowie on Low which is important.
On a mid-’70s conference call with Bowie and Brian Eno, the duo asked Visconti what he could bring to the table for the next album. He told them he had a machine that “fucks with the fabric of time.” The duo got so excited that they dropped their phones and began cheering.
The trio went into the studio to record Bowie’s 1977 LP Low, on which Visconti used the H910 to create cascading effects on the drums of Dennis Davis. Take a listen to the metallic-sounding snare on Breaking Glass and the pitch bend on Sound And Vision.
Tony Agnello, who designed the H910 said “[Visconti] started using it in ways that I never imagined”.
In interviews, Visconti talked about other producers asking how he achieved that drum kit sound on Low - but of course he wouldn’t tell them.
Daniel Lanois & Brian Eno
These guys have worked together for many years and suspect Lanois found his love for the Eventide Harmonizers from Eno via Visconti.
In any event, the pair have made some amazing records U2's Achtung Baby and The Joshua Tree being two from a very long list.
As producers, they are known for working on sounds and loops in the morning before the band arrived, presenting them with an innovative bed in which to create new material. Many of these were created by the later development of the Eventide Harmonizer, the H3000.
Lanois went on to use this device on many of his productions with Sinéad O'Connor, Neil Young, Robbie Robertson and many others: check out Lanois’ Wikipedia page.
My particular favourites are Acadie (Daniel Lanois), Oh Mercy (Bob Dylan) and Yellow Moon (The Neville Brothers) - all recorded in 1989 plus Teatro (Willie Nelson) and Wrecking Ball (Emmylou Harris).
Supertone Records
Inspired but these giants of the audio world I have been using Eventide for years as a producer, but only since we opened our first commercial studio in 2014, as a ‘prengineer’ (my name for the record producer and engineer).
They have featured in all the Starlite Campbell Band records to date and are now heavily utilised in the brand-new Starlite.One material. Who doesn’t want to fuck with the fabric of time ehh?
And finally…
I hope you have enjoyed this piece and would love for you to share any stories you have in the comments below.
Next up is Suzy. Have a great week.
Working on: Guitars, vocals and synthesisers for the new Starlite & Campbell album, Starlite.One
Listening to: David Bowie - Low
What’s cooking: Chicken Tagine with prunes and almonds in the style of the Rif mountains from the superb book, The Food of Morocco.