Behind the sound · · Tomek Piskor-Ślesicki
Recording Helenko: keeping the imperfections in
Played softly, this little celeste sounds like a half-remembered lullaby. It isn't a perfect instrument, and that's exactly why I love it. I spent a year keeping in every quirk most people would have polished away.
Most of the work in a sample library goes into removing this kind of thing. You even out the volumes, retune the stray notes, scrub the mechanical sounds until the instrument is clean and obedient. I find that sad. Those small noises are usually the most interesting part.
So I set out to capture this celeste's character rather than hide it. It began with a video and a long search, and ended in a year of late nights and some very odd equipment.
the instrument
- maker
- Jenco
- built
- 1930s
- where
- United States
- what it is
- Tabletop celeste that folds into a suitcase
The one with a soul
It started with Trentemøller. He's one of the reasons I wanted to make music in the first place, and being a research addict, I wanted to know his process. So when I stumbled on a video of the Electronic Beats team visiting his studio, I was hooked. Among all the synths, guitars and studio gear, one piece looked like the thing he loved most: a celeste.
Not a posh Mustel or a Schiedmayer. A Jenco, an American maker, and even through a screen it had a soul.
It took years of patient searching to find my own, and from the first notes I played, I was in love.
Worth doing twice
I recorded Helenko twice. The first session came right after Blisko, on the same chain I'd used for the strings: ribbon mics into vintage Neumann preamps. It sounded great, and I could have stopped there.
Then a friend mentioned he was selling a pair of 1950s McCurdy tube preamps. I went to hear them and couldn't stop smiling the whole way home. McCurdy is an obscure Canadian brand, not one you mention in the same breath as Neve. I later learnt the same model was used to record Arcade Fire's "The Suburbs", which doesn't surprise me.
So I did the unreasonable thing and recorded the entire instrument again through the McCurdys. Worth every hour. That sound has been the backbone of my studio ever since.
The processing is all analogue too: a Rohde & Schwarz compressor, a pair of Klein+Hummel UE-1000 EQs. Helenko is the first instrument I finished with no plugins anywhere.
I recorded it close, with the mechanics clearly there in the sound. The uneven keys and the notes that hang on came through exactly as they play. When you pick up a violin or a new synth, you don't fight its character. You learn it and find its sweet spots. Helenko asks the same.
McCurdy AU300 tube preamps from the 1950s, used to record the Helenko celeste library.
Pulling the celeste apart
The acoustic patches were the straightforward half: sample the celeste deeply, and capture the lid at a range of positions so it can open and close in the plugin. The Afterglows are where the long nights went. They aren't effects laid over the acoustic sound. They're separate, built from takes I recorded only to wreck, then run through vintage hardware until almost nothing of the celeste survives. All of it analogue, as though this were a 1950s electronic studio (without the avant-garde pretence).
Days Of Our Lives took the most work. I time-stretched the recordings hard, printed them to tape, pushed them through a pitch shifter and an EMT digital plate, then set the result against a Polivoks, a synth often described as the Soviet Minimoog (which I think is a bit of an overstatment), its oscillators detuned by hand to keep a slight tension in every chord. The mod wheel opens a filter as you play: a Maihak W49, the model Stockhausen used, and this exact unit came from the Polish Radio Experimental Studio, where Eugeniusz Rudnik worked it. Velocity sets how much of the hand-detuning you hear, and a Degrade control adds grit on top, in case there wasn't enough already.
Dancing With Devils came out of an old tape trick. I ran the celeste through a stack of echoes onto tape, and as it recorded I pulled the tape away from the heads with a cotton swab. The further it drifts, the more the sound blurs, loses its highs, and lets the hiss in. I lifted the top end to bring the hiss forward, until the celeste had become a strange sort of organ, and followed it there. Dig into the keys and a sharp, flute-like transient comes in, one that took an absurdly long time to synthesise, for reasons I still can't explain. For a while I called the patch Sátántangó, after the seven-and-a-half-hour Béla Tarr film I happen to love.
Arrival is the calm one, and the only place I let granular synthesis in. The pad underneath came from a chain of hardware I can't reconstruct, since I keep no patch notes and never will, and over the top my wife, Dorota, sang, through a V41 preamp, a 1940s ancestor of the Telefunken V76. The mod wheel brings more of her voice in as you lean on it. A few days later I ran those same vocals through an 8-bit sampler and a huge 1940s Altec 322c tube limiter, and they became the lo-fi heart of Rosemary Was Right. And then there's Lighthouse, which taught me one lasting lesson: don't run your celeste through a ring modulator. Ever.
Some hardware used for the Helenko Afterglow patches - a Binson Echorec, and the Publison DHM-89 B2 early digital pitch shifter.
Awake, both ways
Helenko took a year and a lot of sleepless nights. A few of those were the instrument. Most were Helenka. She was born while I was finishing it, which is how it got her name, and somewhere in the small hours the celeste and the baby blurred into one long, tired, happy stretch. Being a father, it turns out, is wonderful and time-consuming in about equal measure.
I'm glad I spent the year that way. Spend a little time learning its habits and it gives back a character all its own.
The trial lets you play most of the patches, free. Sit with it a while. I hope it keeps you up a little too, in the good way.
Plugins mentioned in this article:
A 1930s tabletop celeste with all its quirks left in
$79
from $99
