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38/Tape Op#103/Mr. Hannett/
Chris Hewitt
“After Martin became a studio engineer, he would
often go ‘round to musician Dave Lunt’s house with
pockets full of cassettes of different mixes he had done,
but on getting to Dave’s he would take a look at the
shelves full of jazz records and dive headlong into
playing some of the LPs instead of listening to his
cassette mixes.”
Martin was keenly aware of how spaces translated to
recordings. Much of his production work involved capturing
drums with no ambience and later treating them in the mix.
No tool was more infamous in his hands than the newly
introduced AMS dmx 15-80 delay. -LC
Stuart Nevison: AMS (Advanced Music Systems)
“Whilst Martin Hannett was starting to carve his own
niche in music production, my small company, AMS, not
25 miles north of Manchester, was working on projects
of digital audio processing. In the music recording
business there are two significant elements; the
tracklaying and the mixing process, which I think Martin
had a fascination with.”
Chris Hewitt
“AMS was Advanced Music Systems, and were
established in 1976 by Mark Crabtree and Stuart
Nevison. In 1978 AMS introduced the world’s first
microprocessor-controlled, 15-bit digital delay line. By
October 1978, they had provided Hannett with this AMS
dmx15-80 delay for him to use on the Joy Division song
‘Digital’ at Cargo. Crabtree and Nevison had been
aerospace engineers who moved into the design of
professional studio equipment for the manipulation and
control of sound. The first product designed by the
company was the dm 2-20 Tape Phase Simulator,
notably used by ELO [Electric Light Orchestra], 10cc, and
Paul McCartney.”
Martin Hannett
“The ideas were always there, but at the end of the
‘60s a digital delay line was implemented using these
things called shift registers, which were enormous,
unreliable, and used too much electricity. When little
bits of memory started to arrive, those clever guys at
AMS stuck ’em in a box. Whilst you are recording, you
take all the clues off the snare sound that the ear
needs to recognise a room – we have to put them back,
otherwise it will sound odd. The value I usually set the
display on the AMS dmx 15-80 delay at represents the
first reflection boundary of a room, so by selecting
different values, you can effectively change the size of
the room. The Marshall Time Modulator performs the
same function as the AMS dmx 15-80, but in a
different way, with the result that it has got a different
set of parameters. If I can establish a room sound with
the AMS, and also establish a room sound with the
Marshall Time Modulator, and put them both in the
mix, then I’ve got the sound of the walls of the room
rushing in and out at a fantastic rate. Of course, you
don’t want to hear all that up front, so you bury it in
the track. As for drums, I love echo and drum
synthesisers, but I got a bit worried about using
repeats after I had a fit of quasi realism. I still do ’em
in a fairly subliminal way. Some of it’s from reggae.
Reggae drumming is fairly simple diagrams.”
Tony Wilson: Factory Records co-founder
“Unbeknown to me, until I found out years later,
Martin goes and meets these guys in a car park on the
moors above Burnley [Lancashire, England], and tells
them the sound he’s imagining [while he’s] off his head
on fucking drugs. He drives back to Manchester at
midnight. Meanwhile they drive back to their shed and
they build the world’s first digital delay machine, the
AMS digital delay, which is the most important outboard
equipment of the last 50 years. It was 15 years later,
when some guy stopped me and said, ‘I want to thank
you. One of your partners changed my life.’ When I
realised it was AMS, I said, ‘No, you changed his life by
giving him that equipment.’ He said, ‘Don’t you know
where it came from?’ I had no idea it came out of
Martin’s head. The first time he ever worked with that
digital delay machine was on the song ‘Digital.’ The first
time Martin moved music forward was with the digital
delay machine, which changed drum sounds forever. Did
you know the most sampled track in hip-hop history is
ESG’s ‘You’re No Good’? That was Martin in a New York
basement with three great singers.”
Chris Nagle: engineer
“Those AMS dmx 15-80s were used on every aspect
of Martin’s productions, from his infamous ‘walls
rushing in and out’ philosophy, to the short 85
millisecond delay that New Order incorporated into
their live production, to phasing and flanging on his
John Cooper Clarke work. Martin’s number one rule was
‘never wipe a mistake.’ It may bug the hell out of you
as a musician, but you never know how you later might
be able to incorporate that into a track; i.e., put it in
reverse, feed it through a bunch of effects, see how
that sounds, and bring it up at random somewhere in
the mix. Sonic holograms were created out of various
equipment and sounds in Strawberry.”
Martin Hannett
“That’s been the biggest change in the last ten years;
the enormous flood of digital effects. It started off with
cheap digital delays, and now it’s cheap digital echoes.
For £485 you can get the latest [Alesis] QuadraVerb that
does four digital things at once: delay, chorusing,
reverb, and equalization. They’re gifts to the
imagination, really. You can do all of those difficult
things, without ever getting out of your chair.”
Vini Reilly: guitarist, Durutti Column
“He was always ten years ahead.”
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