A transcribed 5:5:5: with Ted Fletcher, a mastermind of sound.
A great honour to share this interview I did with Orbitsound / TFPro’s Ted Fletcher a while back. Ted selects 5 favourite tracks & answers 5 - from his early performing days and working with Joe Meek, his time at the legendary KPM Studios with the likes of Keith Mansfield & Alan Hawkshaw, the remarkable Alice 828 mixer and his endlessly pioneering work in audio right up to his recent innovations with Airsound and Orbitsound...
But first, a brief back story…
In 2014, I started researching an analogue mixer to sit at the heart of the studio and one evening an old Amek mixer caught my attention. I messaged the seller and we started talking all things analogue…
It was a random connection and Ru the seller was really friendly and engaging - the Amek didn’t work out, and boy am I pleased it didn’t, cos’ instead Ru recommended I seek out a mixer called the Alice 828, enthusing about its stereo limiters, warm pro-sounding pre-amps and insisting it was ‘one of the best he had ever had’.
Well, I was fully intrigued and did a little research… and not long after I found one and snapped it up.
And that was pretty much it, my eyes and ears were opened to Alice. All thanks to a generous fleeting conversation. Ru had mentioned one other thing - he told me the Alice 828 was designed by a gentleman named, Ted Fletcher.
A few years later and I had grown very fond of the Alice 828 - I decided to look up Ted.
Passionate and generous, Ted was happy to give the 828 a welcome service and kindly agreed to be interviewed too.
And so here we are…
“ click click click
… You've got a level? Looks about right.
Good good, Alright, 5 questions... “
Stephen Kin;Aesthetic:
And a pre-question just relating to your 5 tracks, so a very interesting 5 tracks and I was just wondering what they mean to you, if there's a theme or fairly random?
Ted Fletcher:
I think these are tracks that have had an influence on me, in my work.
1) The Who - Pinball Wizard [1969, Track Record]
2) The Beatles - Penny Lane [1967, Parlophone]
3) Fifth Dimension - Rosecrans Blvd. [1967, Liberty]
4) The Beach Boys - Good Vibrations [1966, Capitol]
5) Dire Straits - Romeo and Juliet [1980, Vertigo]
The earliest one is Rosecrons Blvd. by 5th dimension, I was introduced with that track to the work of the writer Jimmy Webb. I've never met Jimmy Webb, but my brother's met him and spent some time with him, being a songwriter - that song was an absolute classic song for its time – it was of the period of McCarther Park so it was a sort of story song which was almost operatic and Jimmy Webb is such a good musician, so that affected me that way, I was really interested in the music and that was back in the day I was running a studio in Denmark Street. They're all songs that have a particular special feature about them – I didnt think too hard about choosing them, but they came very easily.
For example… going over your other questions - Penny Lane was a groundbreaking recording. Pinball Wizard, I just think it's the best record ever made, it's as simple as that. Having worked with The Who and having done quite a bit of work with Pete – that was after they recorded Pinball Wizard – but what a song that is, just extraordinary.
Good Vibrations is just a fabulous production, it took so long to make, I know, and it's been tinkered with over the years, they remixed it and so on, but it's still an amazing track.
S;K
Do you feel like these special features are distinct, which set them apart?
TF:
Yes, though I could’ve chosen 50 tracks of course, all with special features – that Call Me Maybe by Carly Rae Jepson, that's an extraordinary piece of recording I think. So yeah so they've all got special features yes, and they're all musically superb.
S;K
From a production point of view in particular, would you say?
TF:
From writing and production yeah, and just general musicianship.
Ok thank you, so firstly...
1. I wanted to ask how you first got into the world of sound and recording studio innovation?
Yes, it's not a very long story that one. I was studying to be a civil engineer, in fact I studied for a long time, became a civil engineer... I qualified and was working for a local authority in Camberly, Surrey. At the same time I was doing some gigging around in various semi-pro bands and I play a number of instruments, I learnt to play the piano when I was very young, and then learnt reeds, and guitar and so I was playing a lot of music, and quite a lot of singing.
I suppose the real story, the root of the story, is that I was in a little vocal group with my now wife and my brother and we thought it would be a laugh to enter a local talent competition in wokingham, which we won, and the prize was the famous week at Butlins. We went to Butlins and then found of course, it was all a bit of a con as all they really wanted was entertainers.
So we appeared on stage at Butlins and entered other competitions and kept winning them and ended up in London at one of the London theatres - The Cambridge Theatre - and met up with a band who were also doing the same thing, just for a laugh, and they had a recording manager, and that was Joe Meek.
Oh right!
The keyboard player with the original Checkmates as it was, that was Alan Hawkshaw, he said to me... would you like to meet my recording manager, Joe Meek – Anyway, Joe Meek phoned me, Alan gave him my phone number, and invited us up as a little vocal group, the three of us to see if we could do backing vocals on records. We went up to London to Joe Meek's studio - as a sort of audition, we thought - and in fact we got slung into the studio straight away to do some impromptu backing vocals on a couple of tracks he was working on at the time.
Wow.
We then carried on working for Joe Meek, we went up there one day a week, I resigned from my job as a civil engineer, took the plunge, and decided to go professional as a musician. But at the same time, I was playing around a lot with electronics, building equipment because I was really interested in the technology of recording, although I'd never been in the professional recording business at all. Meeting Joe Meek, working with him on the studio side, I also got talking a lot to him about the technology of music recording and learnt a huge amount from him because he was very knowledgable, he'd been in the business a long time – he'd been responsible for outside broadcasts for Radio Luxembourg, that was actually a pretty good grounding and I learnt a lot from Joe Meek then.
I started building equipment which was suitable for studios, I got a job running a studio in Denmark Street... I can’t remember what they wanted originally, but it ended up that what they really wanted was a small studio, which I built. That was the start of my career really, in the professional side of recording, on the technical side. I was also playing and working on sessions, with everybody that was around at the time... The time was 1964, 65, 66, and that's how I got into the business.
Amazing. Well, my third question relates to the studio, so I'll come back to that...
2. The amazing Alice 828 that you designed, is at the heart of the label I'm involved with, Kin-Aesthetic Recordings, and it's at the heart of that studio now and I can't really imagine anything else being there, it's just been revelatory. So, I wondered which piece of equipment you're most proud of and would keep over all others?
Oooh, I don't know... At the time probably the work I did in local radio, in making broadcast telephone conversations good, I designed a telephone balancing unit – it was never vastly successful but it worked very well. It was a purely analogue device, and of course, when people learnt how to manipulate digits really well, that particular technology was obsolete, the analogue, because nowadays it can be done very much better. But at the time it was very, very good.
I suppose in terms of pride, I suppose it has to be the 828.
I do remember the process of how we got to that. I designed some little microphone amplifier-equaliser bits and pieces, for small studioes. Bearing in mind in the 60's, there wasnt anything like that... there wasn’t any equipment available. And I came up with the idea of a six channel mixer, and in fact we built one in the very first days of Alice. The AD62 it was called, it was a single plate mixer with individual channel boards underneath it, with a wooden surround. It was not that successful, and after about a year of selling that product, at the time we sold quite a few – 40 or 50 or something like that... I just thought, how can that product be improved?
For a start, I think it needed a couple more channels, so probably 8 channels. It also needed to be more rugged because the old AD62 wasn’t very strong – it was an aluminium top panel and a wooden surround, so if you dropped it on concrete it would fly apart. So, the idea was to build something rugged, so we decided at the time, with the other guys I had working with me at Alice, we'd make it out of steel. The question was, I'll never forget it, it was a meeting one morning and it was alphexed ? Steel, I know let's make it 1.2mm!?
‘That's going to be horrendously heavy!’ So! All the better, because heavy things are more valuable (laughs). So we built the 828 out of very heavy steel and it proved to be the absolute correct decision, it was absolutely right. It made the mixer pretty rugged, there are problems with the ruggedness of it, but they're internal, they're not with the cases. We'd already been through all the facilities on the AD62, it had all those facilities.
I had designed a little limiter – that actually goes back to Joe Meek days, because he used limiters and compressors all the time. So, I put a simple limiter in each output group of the 828 and that proved to be so successful, it was a major selling feature of the mixer, because it worked – it was actually a limiter, not a compressor - but it really does work extremely well. We didn't go for the cheapest components, it's not cheaply made and we decided to make it professional, in that, at that time the best way of doing a mic amp was using an input transformer, so it had to have input transformers. Components were good, the faders were as good as we could get without going silly – we didn't want to go to using Penny and Giles faders which cost you know, 30 or 40 quid each, that would be daft. But we found some faders which were ok.
We started making it and the number of users we had with the 828, was absolutely ridiculous. They were bought by the army in Singapore, they were bought by the Australian government, they were bought by our own government, for use in British forces broadcasting, as well as the normal people who wanted a small mixer, because it was the classic small mixer. I think it was the first one that really had professional performance. We tidied it up over the first 12 months and because we had some enquiries from the film industry, we put some sockets on the back so that you could power it from car batteries. So all of a sudden, we then sold loads of them to film second units, and they were used consistently on loads of television things... particularly, The Professionals, Taggart... series like that.
The Sweeney? I know we talked about that briefly last time.
That's right, The Sweeney. And everytime I used to see those programmes on TV, I'd think, yeah, actually the sound's not bad! (laughs).
It was fantastic, yeah! That's really interesting.
3) So going back to the studio you mentioned, so that was KPM Studios? Was that in the 70s did you say?
KPM yeah. I actually built the studio in 1967-68, and then I worked in the studio, I think for about four years, it must have been about that, it's a long time ago. During that time of course, turned it from a little one room pure demo studio to do piano and voices, in fact although it was very tiny, the studio area was very small, we actually recorded quite a lot of library music there.
Ah well, I have a prop as well for this part actually, but I was going to ask if you could just tell us a bit about what that was like and how it overlapped with your innovations in studio equipment? The thing I bought as a prop, it's not an original KPM as often they go for ridiculous amounts of money, but it is a fantastic re-issue that came out a little while ago on Strut Records, it's a kind of, sort of best of I suppose.
Ha ha, yeah... Keith Mansfield, Alan Hawkshaw (looks over LP)... I don't remember particularly any of those tracks, but I might well have recorded them, if they're old...
But you were recording library music from the start was it or when did that come about?
KPM decided to create a library department and they put Robin Philips in charge of it... It was rather a grand business, in that they wanted to record big orchestral things and in those days you couldn't record in the UK, you had to go abroad. So he used to go abroad to Frankfert and take with him the writers and a rhythm section, and they’d go over there, do the recording and come back. Some of the editing we used to do in our studio, but I didn't really have a great deal to do with the actual background music then. But Alan Hawkshaw I think it was really, who had the idea, why don't we do a few small group recordings, and don’t say anything to the musicians union because that would have caused awful problems, which is what we did... And we recorded loads of tracks, and particularly a series of Christmas music, almost children's stuff, which Alan did, that was very successful, I know that was used all over the place.
Another famous thing we did, after a session in Munich, Robin Philips came back with a suite, which was done by Jonny Pearson, we heard it, played it back through the monitors in the studio, it was wonderful, absolutely magnificent... There was some really big, classic heavy rhythm stuff in it and robin went to ATV, I think it was at that time, played it to them and they said, yeah yeah we'll use it... if you can do an edit version, by tonight!
They brought it back to the studio, and I worked on it, and edited this as a short section for an intro, and it was News at 10. Dah, dah da daaah. I did the original edit on that.
Just such an amazing aesthetic about it all... feels like very genuine music, somehow...
Oh yeah, well it is. It's music written by musicians. Alan Parker, he was the reason I gave up playing the guitar! Because, I recored him one day at KPM, I can't remember what it was, but it was pretty blooming good. His guitar playing was just so fabulous. I metaphorically took my guitar and threw it out the window. They were all like that, actually. All these guys, Keith Mansfield, great player... Hawkshaw is a stunning player of the Hammond organ. The drummer Clem Catini, people like that were just so good.
So did you get any particular insight out of that, for the equipment side of things?
Well yeah, because I started to introduce techniques that Joe Meek used and it gave a different light to some of the small group background music tracks, and I suppose it was all part of the way that the recorded sound developed in that time. I was particularly interested in developing compressors and so I carried on developing compressors for, well until now... on and on.
That was a good time, a really nice time.
Sounds like an amazing place to have been, and been involved with.
Yeah, that's right.
4. I was reading a fascinating talk on perceptions in record production that you gave and in that you address some of the frailties of the traditional stereo speaker setup, as you see them. I wondered if you could say a bit about that and your Airsound as a future direction for accurate sound reproduction?
Yeah, well the reality is, and it's a real bombshell, two speaker stereo doesn't work. You can put two loud speakers up, 1.6m apart and sit two meters back from the centre line, and you will get a reasonable spatial effect and it sounds ok. But, unless the acoustics are very carefully controlled, you get reflections between the two loud speakers, you're hearing most of the information coming from the middle, which is not a real image, it's a virtual image. The real image is coming from the two loud speakers, but the main information is coming from a virtual image in the middle and your brain, trying to put it all together and make it sound right.
It wasn't a sudden realisation that, it took several years. But, for a long, long time, I realised that there's got to be a better way because when you're listening to a stereo recording, if you move across the plane of where you're listening, you hear phasing effects, you hear the frequency response changing as the sound is being cancelled. That can't be right, there's got to be a better way.
I came to the conclusion that there was a better way, suddenly when I was actually recording a choir... not that long ago, well historically not that long ago, about 1990, something like that. I was using sum and difference technique, with a figure 8 microphone and a cardiode microphone, with the choir, to get a really nice stereo image... And suddenly, it was in the middle of the night and I thought, hang on a minute... There's got to be a way of reversing that and playing it back from the single microphone position, and you hear it stereo. I thought about it a lot and in the morning, this is absolutely true…
I went over to my recording studio workshop and I put together some old loud speaker drivers I had in cardboard tubes and gaffer tape and glue, quickly did some circuitry to route the power amplifiers in a slightly different way, ran it, and it worked. I was excited by it, though it wasn't that good, it took really 4 or 5 years to get it working really well, but that became Airsound, I applied for a patent for it and now it's heavily covered by patents and I decided to form a company to commercialise it. I tried several different types of equipment, like radios, amplifiers, where it could be used, but the obvious one was TV, flat screen TVs were just starting to come in and the sound quality from flatscreen TVs was deteriorating rapidly, so I designed the system into what became the soundbar...
In fact, that was the soundbar that we developed at Orbitsound, as it was then, a product called the T12, it was the first really successful soundbar, for about a year it was the national top selling soundbar – of course, being very successful as it was, all the competitors saw how successful we were and they all jumped in and tried to emulate it – fortunately they didn't nick my technology, although I expected them to, I really expected them to copy it because it's so plainly better than using two speakers too close together in front of a TV, it's much better than that – but I don't know, they must all have cloth ears or something - but they didn't, they all tried to simulate stereo, use digital mucking about and that's a complete waste of time.
So, that's how Airsound came about and now it's become successful, very successful.
It sounds like the difference is just an absolute thorough and overarching knowledge you have on the whole system of sound and maybe a lot of people don't probably quite understand – you can come at it from a very narrow point of view, but unless you understand the broader concepts, it's difficult to create something like that…
I think that's absolutely true – I'm fortunate in that my background is very wide-ranging from civil engineering and mathematics to being a musician and running a studio and designing electronics, so it's a multiple thing.
5) That leads into my last question actually, I can see that you explored virtually every aspect of sound production and processing in recent years, so what have you been working on recently – is it all speaker orientated these days?
It's speaker orientated yes, (Ted thinks for a moment), yeah I can talk about it – it's a new amplifier type. The conventional amplifier, this is again a breakthrough, it's new - a conventional amplifier, over the years people develop amplifiers and they've got them very good, they've got them to super frequency response and wonderfully low distortion and they're great – and the people who've developed loud speakers, have developed loud speakers which are better and better and better.
But no one really has successfully approached both things at once and combined them to make the amplifier correctly suit the loud speaker. So again this is an idea that I came up with a few years ago and tried out in my studio, down in Devon. I designed an amplifier that actually incorporated the loud speaker in its feedback, so that the amplifier and the loud speaker became one, and I tried it out and it sounded wonderful... I played it to a few people and everyone was very impressed but it wasn’t a technology that had an obvious use.
The difference between that and conventional amplifiers was clear to anyone with good ears but it's all clouded by commercial pressures, what's gone before and so on. So it's only in the last 18months that I've gone back to that technology and we decided, the people who now run Orbit Sound, which is not me particularly now, it's my son and the financiers; one of the financiers wanted us to produce a loud speaker of absolute ultimate performance, that would go very loud and would produce music to absolute ultimate quality. So asked me how we should do it, originally we designed it with digital amplifiers and with conventional, absolute best possible loud speakers. But you know, when we were testing it, I thought, I don't know, maybe there's a better way – so I tried out one of my amplifiers, and it sounded better...
And so now we're near the end of the development work on it, it's called the Dimension, the speaker it's now fitted with 5 amplifiers, they're called transconductance amplifiers, it's a known technology but nobody has really gone into how to do the feedback properly, how to make it stable and make it wide-frequency range – there are some little problems with transconductance amplifiers, but I think we've overcome them and it really is worth it, because now with a system, fitted with these amps, you hear things on record you didn't hear before. In fact you didn't even hear in the original recording studio, they are extraordinary.
The first time I played with it, back down in Devon – I was listening to a track recorded by Elton John, it was a live recording and there was a strange sound on it – I couldn't work out what it was. It wasn't audible at all on normal systems, but with this amplifier you could hear this sound, this very strange slight scratchy, bumpy sound, very very low level, and I realised he was touching a mic stand with his foot! I suddenly realised, yeah that's what it was.
So that's what I've got in here now, experimental amplifiers, there's one in here and five in there, but the clarity of the sound is as though you've taken a curtain away, that's the best – and we're now talking about fitting it to all our products, everything.
Sounds like you've made a real big innovation with it?
I think so. As with all these things, it's never straightforward, there's always more to it than you think – outside influences have a much greater effect than you think. As any innovation, you have this problem. The obvious one is Dyson, it took him 25 years to get where he is now.
Sounds like you're doing well!
Yeah, we're doing all right, and it's fun.
Well thank you very much indeed, that was fascinating, thank you Ted.
A massive and heartfelt thanks to Ted, for this fascinating interview and his all-round passion and generosity of spirit - Explore the striking Orbitsound aesthetic over here and check out a wealth of detail, information and studio resources over on Ted’s TFPRO website.
