Being Martin Hannett

For the purposes of the first recording session for Sound A Like, I took on the role of producer. This wasn't a role that I picked for myself as Nick elected that I take on this particular duty for the drums, but it was definitely a role that I was happy to take. Given my knowledge of the song and how it sounds, I was relatively confident in my ability to guide the session in the direction that it needed to go. For a lot of years I have desperately wanted to know how the drum sounds on the Joy Division records were achieved so this was a perfect opportunity for me to put my knowledge of internet myths surrounding these records to the test. Short of becoming the drug addled monster that was Martin Hannett, I tried to my best replicate the techniques he supposedly used to achieve the very unique drum sounds on Transmission but what we soon found was that the internet myths we were following may have actually been just that, myths.

I think there were definitely some stages of the recording session where decisions had to be made in terms of how a piece of the kit was recorded and despite me wearing a producer hat I did try to make this as democratic as possible. What I started to find though was that people were hesitant to make firm decisions on aspects of the session and that I needed, which was when I needed to actually step in and "produce". Even though I was hesitant about this at first because I wanted to make sure everyone had their voice heard I think it did aid in the running of the session.

In terms of new skills I think the producer role itself was something I was not familiar with before. I normally never work on recordings with other people and when I do it's in a band situation. Communicating within a band is easy because generally you are quite close to each other and can have pretty clear and firm discussions, knowing that you won't hurt anyones feelings but when working in a group like this I really wasn't sure of how to communicate ideas in a way that would be received well by the whole group. Lucky for me everyone was pretty supportive and happy to work with direction I gave. Or so it seemed on my end.

I think the only thing I might have done better was to not involve myself in other peoples roles. There were a couple of situations were say someone was struggling on the desk or in Pro Tools and I quickly jumped in to solve the issue. I did this because we had a drummer sitting in a live room asking what was happening and I thought it would aid in the speed of the session. However at one stage Clarkey did comment "Are we changing roles a little bit" which made me realise I needed to try to stick my role for the day and let the others within the group trouble shoot any problems and ultimately have a better learning experience.