Matthew Herbert talks recording.

One area where Herbert has eventually compromised sound quality for usability is in his choice of sampler. “I’ve moved almost entirely, very reluctantly, to software samplers, mainly because of the quickness of editing. For example, the pig record is made with six months to a year’s worth of recordings. I record onto a Nagra V, onto a hard drive, and then transfer that onto a computer. So it’s very easy for me to drag it across and import it.

“A typical record of mine will end up with two to three thousand recordings, and handling all that data is best suited to the computer. It still doesn’t sound as good as the Emu, which I used for a long time. My favourite sampler is still the first Akai made, the 612, because it’s like an analogue synth, all knobs and buttons, and you can edit physically with two sliders. There’s no menus or anything like that, so it feels more intuitive and like an instrument, and it sounds wonderful as well. But just from a data management point of view, I feel compelled to use a computer, unfortunately.

“Also, I sample everything in stereo, but microphone inputs on hardware samplers have always been mono. I recorded the whole [One Pig] album in M/S, so I could decide how narrow or wide I wanted the stereo image. I could pull out detail, or sort of zoom out, more towards the atmosphere of the room. So before I’ve even got into making music, before I start to put the pieces of music together, just that one thing — how wide or narrow the stereo image is going to be — is an artistic decision for me.”
Once the raw recordings for a project such as One Pig have been safely transferred to their new digital home in the Mac, there arises the question of how to turn them into music. Again, the key issue for Herbert is finding a balance between matching the power and immediacy of chart music and respecting the integrity of the source recordings and the stories they tell. “You want the provenance to be clear, and you want the story to still carry through, and the atmosphere to still be there. There’s no point in recording a pig being born and treating it so it sounds indistinguishable from an electric guitar. So there’s a tension there, and that tension is something I’m always working out, and sometimes I get it right and sometimes I get it wrong. It’s a pretty hard thing to get right all the time, I think.

“There’s quite a few different techniques that I use. One of the main ones used to be to identify a key piece of audio that you feel carries the story most effectively, and then chop it up. I used to do that manually, and now — I can’t decide if it’s a good thing or a bad thing — Logic will chop it up at transients and lay it out over the keyboard in 10 seconds. So basically something that I spent the last 20 years doing manually, and has taken hours and hours of my time, can now be done incredibly quickly. But unfortunately, it nudges them straight up to the transients, whereas I much prefer a more random approach.”

Matthew Herbert’s horror of falling into lazy habits or repeating himself has led him to some interesting decisions as to how samples should actually be played. He dislikes samples that are ruthlessly edited, to the point where his manifesto now incorporates a prohibition against trimming the tail of a sample. “It makes you play differently if you hit the key and the transient is heard one second afterwards. It forces you to play in a very different way than if it’s instant. And that’s something that I find very unsatisfactory about modern software sample libraries and synths, just how instant everything is. There isn’t that element of chance there.”

He also forces himself to program the samples in different ways. “Particularly for someone like me, who’s played piano my whole life, I’m still inputting sounds for the most part on a piano keyboard, but just the shape of my hands and I how I play it leads me to input music in a certain way. I’m trying to break that, so recently I got a little Akai MPD thing and I’m trying to play bass lines and chords on that. It’s forcing me to use my fingers differently, so the chords aren’t just the same. That’s what the manifesto is about: giving yourself limitations and parameters to work around, and forcing yourself to engage with the process every time.”