Brindlestyle

 KING STREET SYDNEY Chris Doyle with a twinkle in his eye. "I recorded a demo at Alberts. My 12 year old bass broke the night before, I think I cried. When I got there they hand me what's's-names bass, from the Easybeats" Vanda and Young

Maiia: Marvellous Aus' history

Paul Green: Brilliant Aus' rock history, had a moment when I saw the control room Harry and George's chairs ..lol Maiia: who was recording there at the time?

Paul Green: Everyone. When I first went, John Paul Young was recording Love is In the Air. (To -Steve Kipner show on ABC) ..lol Mick Kenny and I were both recording there at the same time, we played together on stage many many years before and we didn't know each other

Maiia Why does that name ring a bell?

Paul Green - "He was up in Queensland working with me and Phillip Rigg ..and others. Mick Kenny was from Crossfire. The drummer was a product of Cairns too

Maiia: The media/marketing link shows, Alberts also owned a radio station.

Paul Green: Yeah 2uw. Alberts were a real foundation of the industry. To go into a major studio used to be a complete trip. To walk into the building and look through the lil window and see an orchestra in studio A and a rock band in studio B ......which would've been historic bands ...was something else, it was a world unto itself and you felt special just getting into one.

Paul Green: The guy Col' used to be the tape op when I was there. With tape we used to use a chinagraph pencil to mark the splice on a reel of tape and a razor blade to cut it time consuming and awkward in comparison ..lol now its copy and paste. My first computer recorder was an Atari that only recorded midi stuff so you'd do a sub-mix of midi sounds and bounce that across to tape while say you'd lay down a bass track live with it then get a second tape machine and play the last mix of midi and bass through a mixer with a live rhythm guitar track to the second tape machine ..lol and keep bouncing them back and forth

Maiia: I'm with copy and paste - still I do remember the different skills and flow we developed back in the days of pen an' paper.  And it is definitely not like puter.

Paul Green: Lol I can understand that but this was before we had 4 track tape ..lol. Then the world went nuts when we got 8 tracks to use.. lol I was fascinated with the new technology. I hated it for what it did to the recording industry but yet embraced it ...as I would've been a fool not to. Fuck we used to try and make an album on 8 megs ...lol, of memory. The equation hasn't changed 1 minute of stereo music is 5 meg so you can imagine what we went through cramming an album into 8...lol

Paul Green - record companies could get their hands on cheap sub standard product so didn't come up with the budgets for a major studio when a backyard set up was available

Maiia: now who owns these companies in this period? Australian?

Paul Green: well a lot of subsidiaries opened up shoe string companies aiming for maximum return on minimal outlay. Well cd itself or digital ..is substandard audio wise

Maiia: I feel that myself but I thought it was just nostalgia lol- listening to all the wah they sold us in the change to CD's.

Paul Green: When I joined John Williamson the front of house and studio engineer Steve and I would argue over digital versus analogue I used to work in Steve's studio in Tamworth, my point was c.d lacked the depth of vinyl and Steve's was ...the ease of editing. Maiia: It does seem like some layers are missing

Paul Green: it comes down to the different formats of compression, we come back to how analogue is converted into binary again, the most significant thing in the digital world are the a/d ( anologue to digital ) converters and coming back out the d/a converters turns it back into analogue so we can hear it

Maiia : witchcraft I tell ya

Paul Green: fuck yeah ..lol digital recording is based on the size of the memory of the machine, the amount of data that can be stored at a given sample or bit rate as digital converters get better the file size gets bigger. So in essence its trying to get back all that sound that's been missing for so long which brings us back to compression , MP3 ....is a form of compression Mp3 compresses at a ratio of 11 to 1

Maiia: aha I got a sense that's probably your point about sub-standard product, -the 1980s.

Paul Green: oh yeah the 80's produced some of the greatest crap known to man Paul Green: innovation was in the hands of the musicians in the 70's, come the 80's and it was in the hands of the engineers, the 1970's by far one of the most creative periods ever in music, back to compression

Maiia: aha

Paul Green: what compression tries to do is mask the listeners ear by removing particles of sound that the ear conceives as background noise so fair enough they succeed in doing that but it doesn't sound the same anymore it becomes sterile  the equation they use removes 3 decibels off the bottom end of a sound so there's a fair lump of subtraction there to begin with, all this was deemed as unnecessary data : then you put a vinyl disc on and weep ..lol

Maiia : deemed unnecessary data by people or computer?

Paul Green: by people initially ...and they made it into an algorythm which became part of the compression process that's just one example there are many forms of compression out there

Maiia: ae that there are laddie

Paul Green: so yay it's just another learning curve ...ouch. What I'm describing here is old news , many things have developed along the way I got fucked off with it all ...because you stop becoming a writer or performer to a degree and become a part time 'puter repair man ....fuck that ..lol

Maiia : hear hear!

 Paul Green: You might find the odd bit of useful clatter in there at the Alberts site great old photos

Maiia: So digitally remastered isn't anything at all, they say it like it's new and superior

Paul Green: in my eyes its a bit of a sham. In a lot of cases like that P Diddy fraud ...they might load a track in digitally ...do some cut and paste and presto.....a vehicle to use the term digitally remastered ..lol but here we can go into another world of digital there is digital equipment available that is right up there in the quality stakes for instance the " Cedar " system a very high end system for mastering and the major studios went digital with sony and mci 2 inch digital tape machines too which were basically a 24 track machine on digital tape that was beautiful stuff but that's a hell of a long way from some dickhead in a garage with his pentium 500 ...lol

 Maiia : lol there is a place where I trade spirit for quality.

  Paul Green: I know what you mean, its the stuff pioneers are made of and Jesus we need them too. You used to be able to tell when new toys came out in the 'puter market ....who got hold of em ..lol......some used them in the name of good and some just had no fucking idea ..lol Dropped an email to Amos Garret the other night while feeling melancholy thanks for the guitar solo on Midnight at the Oasis ..lmao my fav guitar solo of all time, Maria Muldaur

Maiia - quite a thing

 Paul Green: yeah it definitely changed a lot of the ways I had been looking at music and guitar in general and particularly about session playing I'd say him, Steely Dan and Little Feat were the three biggest- ohh and Donny and Stevie of course , influences I had

  ..lol: not a bad mixed grill in any restaurant Maiia; Bluie was doing Rikki Dont Lose That Number which is a good pick for a covers band.

Mr Green: who with ?

Maiia: just a throw together I think Frank, (pictured right) Mushy, Chris and Lionel. Frank sang nice.

Paul Green: hmmmm Frank used to impress me as a singer in the Beer Gut Brothers Maiia : was that with Slatts? Paul Green:: yeah it was. Franks's got timbre, or is that timber ..?...lol

Maiia : lol when was that?

 Paul Green:: wooden have a clue: hmmmmm 81 to 83 ?I dunno it was a bit of a blurr Slatts and I were pissed . lol Early 80's I know that much ..lol

Maiia: this is one area where I notice the technology is not being used to it's potential

Paul Green: drinking ? Maiia No archiving, like there is fuck all about Rodney Rude on the internet save his merchandising -The mans a national icon

Paul Green: yeah he seems to be able to exists sans crap

Maiia: Rude was telling Kris Peters he has his own archive so I'm glad the history is recorded. Hope the memoir is coming along, he's cunning enough to make a living as a comedian that's one heluvan achievement.

Paul Green: shit yeah!  So is Wilson ): bastard pinched one of my songs Slatts sung to him blind at a party ..lol

Maiia: fair go?

 Paul Green:: yep

Maria: This is not a joke, like I Give up Wanking Last Easter?

Paul Green:: sitting on the lounge pissed together ... Slatts has gone ...Kev you'll like this one, and he did ...