The Sheffield Scenester

We were invited down to Steve Ellis’s studio to interview him about the production and sound engineering side of the music industry, plus we were promised some of his famous vegetable stew. Numerous bands have in fact talked about his capacity to feed the five thousand from one pot, so that clinched the deal for us……lol! But work comes first, so settling into the quiet confines of his studio we began our interview, or to be more accurate we sat down for a good old chin-wag, and here it is;

Scenester: If you could start by telling us how you got into this side of the music industry?

Steve: It came from when I was about eight or nine and started doing classical guitar, sort of got into it and started doing okay, then some TV programme came on and that was it I didn’t pick it up again until I was eighteen by which time I got a real passion for it. Obviously at that stage it’s not just a case of doing covers and learning chords but writing music, so I borrowed a little drum machine and a four track, but I became really frustrated because there were only four tracks on the cassette and I wanted to do more. I would then do the four tracks and bounce it onto my stereo and start again, then when I went to college, to pay my way I started doing live sound whilst re-investing in PA equipment which was bringing me a bit more income which meant I could start buying studio equipment. I then became the house engineer at Barnsley College followed by The Leopard in Doncaster, but it was when I was working for a music community that I met Jim from The Hosts. Jim then started working with a band and said to me “This band I work with know you!” I’d been doing sound for this band which was basically Tiny Dancers, so they asked me to do an audition gig and gave me the job!

That really got me back into Sheffield, prior to that I was working at The Corporation on Bank Street and then I worked with them a short while at their current location, really the Tiny Dancers gig got me into a different scene, another level altogether, and from there it just snowballed! Through Tiny Dancers I got The Hosts, through them I met Alvarez Kings at a Hosts Christmas show down at The Shakespeare, because there was no house engineer I got roped into doing Alvarez Kings. Three months later Alvarez called to say they had the Magna gig with Little Man Tate and could I do the sound, while all the time I was running the studio. So it was quite odd at times cos I was doing this sort of indie thing and then in the studio I had this hardcore thrash band, literally from one extreme to another!
I did a single for this band called Carousel Moon, it was in the rehearsal room above Vernon’s Bakery, they later went on to become Little Man Tate, but back then it was basically Maz and Jon. At the time it was Barney Vernon’s wife’s cousin or brother, I can’t remember, he was on vocals, then Jon started doing more and more but I lost touch with them for years, then when the Sheffield scene exploded they rode it!

Scenester: In terms of the jobs that you do, is it a question of doing it because you like the actual music itself or do you do it because it’s a paying job?

Steve: The stage that I’m at now I can’t pick and choose too much, but I will say if its rap or hip hop then go somewhere else because I don’t understand it, I just don’t get the culture and I don’t get this drum beat type of thing! I’m from a guitar based background and anything with a guitar will interest me in some form or other, be it classical, rock or indie. I do have principles, and the studio itself is set up for guitar based music, it’s not all about midi-programme sequencing, I ain’t even got midi in the studio. I suppose you could say I’m from an old school perspective where its real people make real music, a lot of the slick American rock is so plasticized, literally everything is cut to the bar and quantized and made perfect.

Now if you put on an old Rolling Stones album or an old AC/DC, it kinda ebbs and flows and that’s the human feel and that’s where I’m from, it’s just the energy and the intimacy of people working together. I think little mistakes add to things rather than become detrimental, it adds to the feel and the passion of the music, I think a natural honest performance far out weighs perfection, if you want perfection you should stick to dance music!

Scenester: Recently we’ve noticed that more and more guitar bands are in fact using programming in their live shows, so how do you feel about that?

Steve: If a band were bass, drum, guitar and vocals but they’d got sequencing then yeah I’d do that but it’s not something I’d want to sit down, produce and write, that’s really were I come from. I think I’m trying to help a band achieve its goals, if they’ve got the raw song, they’ve done the structure and the arrangement which leaves me to get the best out of them and that’s generally how I see my role.

Scenester: When you work with a band or artist, there are obviously times when you have ‘creative’ differences so how do these get resolved?

Steve: There are times when it can get quite heated in here, yeah, especially when people are really passionate about what they are doing. From my point of view I’m trying to get the best from the performer and sometimes people don’t see the wood from the trees. Some people are gonna fight tooth and nail because they think their part should be louder or they think they played it correctly and sometimes I’m just a neutral observer making little points so if I feel really strongly then I’ll put my point across, hopefully they accept your opinion based on my experience of things. Sometimes bands need saving from themselves, its like they sometimes come up with a ridiculous idea that they’re gonna hate in a month, then they’re gonna throw their recording away! By the same token you can add a little spark that is a pure stroke of genius that makes the music so much more exciting just by mixing a good performance with a little bit of experimentation.

Some bands when they come in and you ask “Do you want it to sound live or do you want it to be studio?” well I think the two things should be separate entities. I think live should be live because you’ve got volume, you’ve got visuals and you’ve got the energy that’s there, whereas in a recording everything just comes out of a speaker, so I try and make it as exciting as it would be at a gig so I have to add extra elements to give you the intensity that you’d get from a gig. So really when people say they want it to sound live, you wonder if they mean crap and out of time, because a live show is all about the visual performance. Whereas in the studio its all about getting across the attitude, you’ve got to make it exciting and explode in the same way and that’s where the bit of experimentation comes in to play, whether its alternate guitar parts or extra percussion. To be honest I don’t care if we have ten guitar parts and they can’t recreate it live, who cares whatever is on the recording so long as the basis is there, after all the fans are going to take something away from the live show that they’ll never get from a recording which is why they’ll always be two separate entities!

With a live recording you get a performance be it warts and all, but with a studio recording, generally I’ll get a rhythm track down, the drums, sometimes the bass before starting to layer on top with basic guitar parts, then obviously so people don’t sit around getting bored we might flip to the vocals, then go back and do additional solos or little embellishments really, then backing vocals, and that’s pretty much how we roll!

Scenester: With each new session do you still find yourself learning new tricks, so to speak?

Steve: Yeah, I think you’re always learning, if you think you know it all then that’s the time to stop, because you can always take something from every session, someone will come in and they will of worked somewhere else and mention something they did which leaves you wondering “Why didn’t I think of that, it’s so obvious!” A few months ago I had a German producer come in, he was doing some editing of guitars but it was so simple that I’d kinda overlooked it. Of course things are time dependant, like when a band has a budget for two days – that’s two or three songs – the experimentation side tends to get dropped so you have to use tried and tested methods to get a reasonable result within that timeframe. I mean I’ve got speaker set-ups and guitar amp set-ups that work with certain genres of music within the minimum amount of time. Plus this keeps the band focused, if you spend an hour playing round with a microphone or a speaker, then they get bored and its all about keeping it fresh as well as them engaged really.

I kinda do experimenting on my own time trying to find out what works and what doesn’t work, but occasionally there will be little oddballs that just come out, and we’ll do something quite mad, sometimes it’s a great effect and then again sometimes they just don’t work. I think you’re better spending five minutes experimenting with something that has the potential to be something quite unique, if it doesn’t work then what have you lost – five minutes! Generally a band that has a higher budget and want better results will be a lot more focused, they’ll have a better idea of what they want, and that’s the difference between demos and finished records, attention to detail!

Scenester: A lot of people see you around town working as a sound engineer but there are probably people out there who don’t know you run your own studio……

Steve: Yeah, it’s really frustrating when you think you’ve been in the game long enough to be quite established, you’re only as good as your previous job and you can’t rest on your laurels really, so I’m trying to constantly turn out a high standard of work and get better where ever possible. I’ve been told that I can’t settle because I like both aspects of the industry just as much as each other and maybe don’t specialize enough in one or the other. But if I’m in the studio too long I go stir crazy and want to get out there and do gigs, but if I’m out there too long, I just want the chance to sleep in my own bed for a change rather than live out of a suitcase.

Scenester: Is there any of your work that you look back and think to yourself “Did I really do that?”

Simon: Yeah, I did a record for a band based out of Sheffield about nine years ago and I’d got a call from one of them, seems he’d been on the internet with someone and they’d got chatting and found out that they knew me somehow. So he put this guy in touch and it was someone from when I first started at college, so he asked if I still had the demos, I managed to find them out on some old tapes, but when I played it…….”Oh no!” I had to tell him that I couldn’t find them! I know I had to start with quite a learning curve but as you progress the results get better and so you don’t want to go back to stuff like that – I think it would be quite detrimental for my name to go out with that!

Having finished a truly educational interview, it was time for the stew which most definitely lived up to the hype, so we’d both like to thank Steve and Tracey for taking up their time as well as their wonderful hospitality!