HOW'D THEY DO IT?

Herein, some behind the scenes tidbits from our recording of "All The Bricks."

The TV's being smashed at the beginning of "Another Brick in the Wall (Part Three)" are actually a box full of bottles being bashed to bits with a hammer. The Snapples made some nice popping sounds. The resulting "Box o' Glass" hung around the studio for the next year or so, proving very useful when additional smashing sound effects were needed. A box of broken glass, taped shut and hit on the side with a hammer, sounds very smashy indeed, as dangerous as it might be.

"Work's what kept us happy," in "Nobody Home," comes from Raising Arizona, which we originally were going to use as a recurring theme throughout the record. In the end, only two samples from the film were used. Can you find the other?

The voice of The Judge in "the Trial" is a mix of two performers, Ted Wilson and Dave Cavalier.

I'd heard that Roger Waters wanted to use Hal from 2001 in the Wall (in some capacity). For us, Hal's death soliloquy seemed to make perfect sense in "Is There Anybody Out There?" His performance is only slightly edited for time, and to fit your TV.

The BBC report was ripped from the web by George Vitray. The guns in "Another Brick in the Wall (Part Two)" are from the videogame "Ghost Recon."

The throbbing windlike sound on "Don't Leave Me Now" is a microphone being moved past a running fan. Fun with Doppler shifts!

Yes, we think the baby crying is the same sample that Prince used. A lot of the incidental machinery sounds, trains, and planes came from unlabeled sound effects CD's, which seem to have been passed around a lot. Have they passed into public domain? Probably not.

The band playing at the beginning of "One of My Turns" is our old next door neighbors at the studio. This is taken from a vocal mic in our live room, so you can see how loud they practiced (you're hearing them through the AC vent). As such, the recording itself is ours, but the music is obviously not. Apparently one member of the band is in Spacehog, the other was in Blind Melon, so there's some potential legal action there.

I believe that, at most, we had around 50 tracks in the largest songs, not counting reverb and echo sends.

The record was started on a Blue and White G3 Mac, I think it blazed along at 350 hertz, single processor. Hence the 14 months to finish, as we changed computers (to a G4!) and operating systems (OS9 to OS10) mid record.

No ProTools was used in the recording, mixing, or mastering of this record, except for the BBC report which might have made it's way through the program en route to our studio. The record was mixed entirely within Digital Performer, using no stolen plug ins.

Incidently, it's a 16 bit recording, 'cause when we started that's all we had. There are undoubtably some tracks that were done through an old ADAT, although I don't remember which ones.