Big Spoon

One of the great things about coming of age in the 1990s was the music

A friend of mine makes a strong argument that 1993 was the greatest year for albums, which doesn’t capture all of my favourites but does stack up a bunch of amazing releases.

Of course, these artists don’t arrive fully-formed and, in the sage words of someone much earlier, they stand on the shoulders of giants.

In particular for this post I want to share a particular recording technique that has excited me, but let’s meander a little more before we arrive at that destination.

The music of the 1990s was exploding in all sorts of directions and some of these were very surprising, although it seems obvious in hindsight.

Rock guitars were roaring back into fashion thanks to grunge bands.

Metal was finding new audiences and then there was the unlikely fusion with rap.

The juggernaut Judgment Night soundtrack brought together collaborations that stand up well today.

A massive leap came with the success of Rage Against The Machine, who remain one of the greatest live acts that I have seen.

The earth literally moved for me when I saw them in the Flemington Racecourse car park for the Big Day Out in 2008, which isn’t hyperbole — it was the crowd stamping their feet and was more intense than any earthquake that I've experienced.

Big Day Outs were another benefit of being a young adult in the 1990s because you got introduced to so many bands that mightn't have been noticed otherwise.

One of those bands at the 2008 BDO was Spoon, whose set I watched while waiting to see Battles.

Their music is beautifully crafted with arrangements that retain a spaciousness.

So it was surprising that their sound seemed so in our faces, particularly as I've mentioned the energy of RATM — both on and off the stage.

As my friends and I were talking over the bands we'd seen that day, we had pondered whether it was compression that gave this effect.

This memory came back to me recently as I was looking at guitar pedal videos.

The JHS Colour Box claims to pack something of the sound of a Neve-like console into a stompbox.

Neve is one of those names that audio geeks will recognise, because Rupert Neve is an engineer that gave airy qualities.

In fact, there are interviews with Rupert where he speaks about how frequencies above human hearing range are still being perceived and his circuits flatter those sounds as they pass through the circuits of his mixing consoles.

As I watched a video about the Colour Box I learned it aims to provide a sound like plugging a guitar directly into the console, as opposed to recording via a microphone in front of a guitar amplifier.

At that moment I realised it was this sound I'd identified all those years ago.