SecondSkin wrote:From and SOS article on recording "A Forest":
...you have to get a sub to read the rest"I got heavily into choruses and flangers on the album," continues Mike Hedges. "I basically collected every single flanger and chorus I could find anywhere in the studio and borrowed them from people with new units, and for 'A Forest' I think we had as many as seven flangers running on 'envelope', flanging on the shape of the sound coming in rather than as a constant. Aside from bass and guitars, you can particularly hear it on the cymbal crashes, which dive away immediately following the hits. You see, Robert was heavily into choruses — he had a JC120, and so if you had a U47 on one speaker of the amp and a 57 on the other, you then had a stereo chorus, which was great. We loved the chorus, and because of that I originally started playing flangers to do choruses until I realised that flangers were fantastic as well, at which point we actually started using the flangers as flangers. These made the overall sound slightly warped — nothing was quite natural, adding to the underlying atmosphere."
Then there was the tape delay, and plenty of it. "Oh, we were really into that," Hedges agrees. "With the machine you'd go into the left, out of the left, and out of the left into the right. The left would then go to the desk and the right would go to the desk, so you'd have two different delays on a stereo machine, and obviously when you spun it you could either have one delay working or both delays or fade between the two. That gave you the effect of it going jang-jang, jang-jang-jang-jang-jang-jang-jang — you could actually have a half-speed delay and then the double-speed one would come through it as you switched the other fader on. I also remember us experimenting with sound on sound on tape delays. There'd be a big rush, a big build-up of sound on top of itself, getting really messy, and that was great, kind of like a reggae thing. Reggae used that quite a lot.
Dear god I love the old Roland JC-120 amps!!! Why hasn't NI or IK included models for those, just not popular enough these days? The Talking Heads used them, that is once they got up to "Fear Of Music" and then forward....the chorus that used to come from the amp, it did dances around ANY pedal ever on the market, including their own Boss pedals....


