Imogen Speaks Imogen Heap is living the dream of every musician with a home studio. Her new solo record, Speak For Yourself, landed her at No. 2 on Billboard's Heatseekers Top New Artist and Alternative New Artist charts in the first week of release. "Hide And Seek," the first single, was used in the dramatic season finale of TV's The O.C.. Recently she wrote, recorded, and sang the closing credit music for The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and she's currently in talks to license more of her music for upcoming film soundtracks. Not bad for a 27-year-old Brit who wrote, recorded, and mixed her latest release by herself. "I've always wanted to make a record on my own, so when I approached this, I thought at the time that I'd learned enough over the years that I could do it," Imogen recalls. "I just needed money, and I didn't want to sign a record deal. I didn't want to have any kind of pressure for a certain kind of single or anything like that. The only pressure was what I put on myself to see what I could do." Without label support, it was up to her to come up with enough cash to live and work. "I traipsed my way 'round every bank, but I couldn't get a loan," she says. "I had £10,000 on my credit card and I couldn't pay my bills." Fearless and determined, she devised a plan to finance her record by taking out another mortgage on her London flat, which had nearly doubled in price since she bought it. The deal left her with enough to upgrade her studio setup with a Pro Tools HD rig, a couple of quality microphones, and a decent preamp. Armed with a few new toys, "loads of plug-ins," her trusty Ensoniq TS-12, and a wealth of ideas, Imogen spent over a year creating a record that blends sophisticated beats, layers of soaring vocals, clever sound design, and rich, expansive textures that blur between electronic and organic. Listening to Speak For Yourself, it's hard to imagine just one person wearing all the musical and technological hats required to create something so complex. But when we sat down with Imogen in her studio via video conference, it became obvious that she is indeed a serious triple threat: vocalist, musician, producer. Background File Imogen Heap under "Overachiever." She plays cello, clarinet, guitar, mbira, and piano. "When I was a kid I'd play piano for four or five hours a day. I had to get my fix, otherwise I'd get cranky. When my parents took me on holiday, they had to make sure there was a piano somewhere so I could play. Either in a marketplace, a church, somewhere. "When I was twelve, I went to boarding school, and I didn't particularly get along with anyone at first," she confesses. "So I spent a lot of time in this cupboard with an Atari and a notation application. I wrote a lot of pieces that way. I found it fascinating that I could write a piece, program it, then hear it immediately. I didn't have to wait for a group to learn it." Her formal orchestration training is evident in the string arrangements featured in nearly every song on Speak For Yourself. "I spent a lot of time studying arranging as a kid, so I know how to make a sampled instrument sound real. The East West Symphonic Orchestra Gold is pretty much all I use for my strings and harp, because they're great," she says. "But I make the strings sound like a live orchestra by inviting a really amazing double bass player [Mich Gerber] into my studio. I get him to play all the low notes, which gives me the breath and 'air' from it being a real instrument. With the real bow action being part of the track, your mind is tricked into thinking you're hearing real strings. I spend ridiculous amounts of time drawing in volume automation, too, because I hate strings that sound fake." Confessions of an Artist "I get seriously irritated by MIDI timing," admits Imogen. "It's always shifting ever so slightly. But in the computer, working with audio, I can make everything exact. I can see everything, so being anal as I am, everything not only has to sound right but it has to look right as well." [Laughs.] She credits former Frou Frou bandmate Guy Sigsworth (Madonna, Bjork, Seal) for her audio-only conversion. "I learned loads from Guy. When I started working with him I instantly stopped sequencing with MIDI. It's so much more fun to create and mangle audio manually, to mold it like Play-Doh. I'd much rather do that than spend hours changing parameters on my JV-1080. I love the malleability of it. If you really know your way inside and out of the plug-ins you've got, you don't ever get to a brick wall. It's unpredictable as well. You can stumble onto something, and because you're working in audio, you've got it right there. It's not going away; you don't have to save it as a preset. "I don't actually have very many keyboards," she adds. "I have my Ensoniq TS-12, which I love very much. I like it, especially, because of its effects. On 'Loose Ends', there's a really high, intentionally loud guitar part, but it's actually the Ensoniq going through a distorted delay. "For some of my sounds I use a waveform created from the signal generator in Pro Tools. I'll take a sine wave or whatever. From that I'll create a sound. One of my favorite tricks is to take the tiniest bit of audio to make a bass note. Then I make a loop out of it and then I tune it up and down for my bass. This is really anal. [Laughs.] I use a frequency-to-pitch chart and manually tune the audio to whatever note I want for the bass. I copy that over and over, changing the pitch and time-stretching it to make my bass part." Vocal Maneuvers Imogen isn't locked into any one method when it comes to writing songs; however, things typically start off with a vocal: "I'll sing an idea, record it, do a harmony to that, or do a rhythmic pattern with my voice. If I'm good, I'll sing my vocal pretty much over a basic backing track, just so I get the vocal really strong and get a great melody before I put anything around it. My vocal is a focal point, but so are all of the other sounds I made. I want the listener to have the experience that they're being sung to, but I want them to also have fun listening to that crazy drum pattern or whatever it is. "I'll get carried away with vocals," she continues, "and it really annoys me because it takes me forever to tie them all together and make them sit just right with each other, and make sure I get all the frequencies sitting right so it's not too 'essie' or plosive. All of my chorus vocal parts are usually tracked three times, at least. They're so fused in with each other that you don't even notice separate tracks. What I'll do is take out the sibilance of the other tracks so you just hear the resonance of the voice, and then the main vocal provides the clarity with all the consonants. "I hate using de-essers, so I ride down manually the sibilance using EQ and automating it to take out the edge of the 's'. I do sometimes use a compressor, though. Usually the Focusrite C3. I don't compress a lot, and again, I manually ride the volume." Mixing Studying orchestration has also played a role in Imogen's concept of the perfect mix: "Probably from my classical upbringing and arranging background, I treat mixing kind of like a score. I make sure this part is working with that part, and not making it sound clunked up. I try to make sure there's interest all over the frequency spectrum. "For dealing with kick drum and bass, I have a little trick. Invariably they get in the way with one another. So what I do is, I'll analyze the frequency of the kick and the bass using Waves PAZ analyzer. Whichever frequencies of the bass are getting in the way of the kick, I'll use a notch EQ to remove those frequencies just at the moment when the kick attack lines up with the bass. That helps the kick come out, and you don't notice that the bass part is altered for a fraction of a second. I do that kind of automation in all areas of the mix. (See "Mixing 'The Walk.'") "I'm constantly reworking the songs as I go," she adds. "None of them on Speak For Yourself ended up the way they started out. I'd try different tempos, different keys, and different production approaches. But I don't start a song, go 'That's not working,' and move on to another one. I make sure there's something out of a song that will make it work. Even if it's just one line of a chorus. I never scrap a song completely and start again. I have to make whatever it is work because I've spent so long working on it, I can't let it go nowhere. Sometimes I end up with hundreds of tracks as I struggle with a song, and then I'll have another version of the song 20 bars later, and then another one and another one. Eventually on the 20th version I have something that's honed in on what I was trying to get at." The Next Step With the recent success Imogen has garnered in the film world, it comes as no surprise that she's eying a new musical direction: "I really, really want to get into composing music for picture. And it's probably not too far off now. I finished a song for The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe, and I worked with the film's composer. I don't know, though, because if I learned anything from working with him, I saw how bloody stressful it is and how I wouldn't want to do it on my own to start with. I'd need to apprentice with someone like him so that I can really learn how to deal with the problems that arise in writing music for film. "That said, there's something like March Of The Penguins that I'm looking at right now, but it's with flamingos. I wouldn't do the whole thing, but I would collaborate. We'll see." Studio Essentials Imogen's list of essential tools in her studio include:
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