Images Of Peter: Finding Peter Godwin, Part Two

Peter Godwin: People who feel music, deliver the soul, whatever the technology or process. It’s all just music. And yes, there’s been a journey from analogue with tape noise and white noise and valve compression and warm sound to clean digital and Logic and systems where you can change and correct and auto-tune and edit anything—including adding back in that warm dirty sound you’re missing sometimes with digital clarity—but finally, it’s all just a means to an end.

I hear something in my head. I try to paint it in sound. That’s production for you. And all the emotion of every vocal, every guitar lick, every technical or physical accident or intention always serves the same purpose. To capture that lightning in a bottle. To freeze frame the moment, the emotion. To record the soul so you can hear it weep or laugh with joy. To tell the tale through magic mosaics that cannot entirely be unraveled or explained.

Every process and approach can work, if you are in the moment, full of faith and committed to that vision. Sometimes, just a breath of voice and a single trembling chord. Sometimes less is more.

Equally, symphonies of organic and inorganic sounds, so complex they can never fully be deciphered can also move you to tears. So sometimes more is more!

Openness and improvisation has always been at the heart of my process. It may sound planned and pre-arranged, but it hardly ever is. Often, the best moments were a one-off vocal or guitar or synth or piano, and usually involving some beautiful accident of performance.

Antares’ Auto-Tune

Like suddenly deciding when the recording light went on, not to sing the whole French song that was the original “Milonga Moon” and which the backing-track music was recorded for, deciding in that moment to speak it in fragments, placed on the song by instinct, as the track rolled by, and then left there and kept that way.

This is just one example of thousands of moments in studios that I have experienced, where instinct and spontaneity take over and surprising new choices are made. These are the strategies that everybody has been using in their own way, since the beginning of recorded music, whatever the technology used to capture that moment.

In a studio you might want to hear how it would sound through stadium speakers or a nightclub system or laptop speakers or iPod headphones, and these technical conundrums and compromises have frustrated and confused music makers since I began all those years ago at Air London.

But one thing will always survive and always transcend those concerns: the soul and vision and atmosphere and attitude of that music—the only question—does it shine through?

If you can sometimes translate what you heard in your head, in your dreams into a language that moves someone, somewhere on the planet. Well, then you’ve got it down!

I’ve always engaged in the whole process of trying to capture that magic, whether officially or unofficially, credited or uncredited—what is known as production and seems to mean different things to different people. For me, it’s just an extension of that creation that may begin with a song or a groove or a riff . . . that producing of the music is just pushing the magic ’til it rhymes with your head.. And everyone in the room agrees to say, “Stop.” It’s done. It’s finished.

No more paint on the canvas. This is what we want to say right now. And you listen and from then on every time you hear it, it will sound and even become different.

One day you might be able to hear it like a stranger, discovering it for the first time. That’s a beautiful moment!

Click here to read more from Peter Godwin on. . .

Music Video Influences
Maturing inspirations
Poetry and Collaboration
Artistic suffocation
Chemistry and Alchemy
Old souls
Catharsis
Changes
Transcending technology
Everything Is Possible

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