It's not supposed to necessarily sound like these are samples and these are live instruments and it's all glued together. Gareth Parton at Fortress Studios, where Thunder, Lightning, Strike was mixed. So there can be four bass guitars going off at the same time or four drum kits going off at the same time. Considering that samples can cost an average of £6000 to clear and each of the tracks on the Go! So it makes sense to use Flying Faders automation and it's great anyway. Within weeks, they'd been spirited away to Fortress Studios to record the new vocals for 'Huddle Formation'. Lightning Master Corporation employs experts in the field who customize and install lightning protection systems that protect your property from both direct and indirect lightning strikes and electrical surges. You sort of start mixing it from scratch and then you have to A-B all the time to make sure we're going along the same route. Because of the way that I work, I don't tend to do a lot of automation within Pro Tools because if you're doing fader rides before you hit the compressors on the desk, then that kind of defeats the object of it. When a lightning storm occurred near the plant one day, a lightning bolt struck one of their high-tension wires, causing a major short circuit. And he'd spot if I was trying to make anything slightly stereo and say 'Can you bring that in a bit?' From all of these examples, it is clear that lightning strikes can cause tremendous damage. In terms of damage and destruction, the Brescia incident is still considered one of the worst lightning strikes in history. Was Ian happy with Pro Tools in the end then? "I think Ian's tinkered around with them a little bit and had to pitch them, because of course the versions that we had weren't in concert pitch, and obviously you can't be retuning guitars all the time. Electrical power to the city was lost for nearly 25 hours, creating fear and confusion among the population. Essentially the work of Brighton-based Ian Parton, formerly a maker of documentaries for the Discovery Channel, the Mercury Prize-nominated album began as a series of sample-collage experiments fitted in between overseas filming trips. And I don't think he's used his S1000 since. In 'Everyone's A VIP' there's a really high-pitched string line that's time-stretched to buggery and distorted. Moveable Arm Grounding System – MAGS – Reference List, Lightning Master® Streamer-Delaying vs. Franklin Rod Technology. ", Live, the Go! A new world record lightning strike of 440 miles has been confirmed … So there's a little bit of Auto-Tuning going on, say on the new live trumpets where the player wasn't quite getting the right inbetweeniness and we had to do a bit of tinkering. We wrote the book on static solutions and lightning protection. The vocal samples are quite often taken from VHS, the rappy cheerleader stuff is from straight-to-video films. Scientists have detected a record-breaking lightning bolt that was 321.1 kilometers (199.5 miles) in length, roughly the distance between New York City and Washington D.C. The original demos he did were with an Atari 1040 running Cubase and an S1000 sampler in about 2000. Most of the recordings made at Fortress were tracked to an Otari reel-to-reel recorder before being transferred to Pro Tools. The record's co-producer, Ian's elder brother Gareth Parton, has been engineering at various studios including Strongroom, Livingston and the Church since the early '90s and was brought in to help with the project's pre-production, long before the operation moved to Fortress Studios in North London for mixing. There's a few higher-profile things, but they tend to be cover versions of higher profile acts, like the strings from a cover version of... something or other.". Photo: Richard Ecclestone, Despite being a fan of Pro Tools, Gareth admits that, for the Go! "The problem across the board with Ian's stuff is it's layers and layers of samples. Which was a Godsend really, 'cause he's a good drummer, but when you're playing on top of loops, it's getting a balance between being totally tight-ass, 'cause that's not what this is about, and being... acceptable. I've actually got Genelecs, mate...". The United Nation's World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) has just announced that the longest lightning strike on record was a 2007 bolt in Oklahoma that stretched 321 km (200 miles) - almost reaching from one side of the state to the other. But that was deliberate as well. A church was being used as a battery to store approximately 100 tons of gunpowder. "He's been mucking around with it for years and years. "Oh yeah. We'd sit here, almost in tears, laughing at what they'd done. "We'd set up the desk in their garage and have tie lines going up to the kitchen where he'd record the drums," says Gareth. Gareth admits that it took some time for his brother (who he reckons would "happily master everything to cassette if he could") to accept his advice and take the leap into the digital domain. What is a "hybrid" audio interface anyway? That became, like, urgh. If I'd have realised at the time, I'd have stuck down mixes without the samples on.". S cientists say the world’s longest lightning bolt traveled 199.5 miles and also confirmed the existence of a lightning flash that lasted for over 7 seconds. One of the oldest and worst lightning strikes ever recorded happened in the town of Brescia, Italy, in 1769. "I'm used to working in this room, I've worked down here for years and I'm really comfortable with the Genelec [1030A] monitors. "That's kind of saved the record's ass really," Gareth admits. Great care has been taken to ensure accuracy in the preparation of this article but neither Sound On Sound Limited nor the publishers can be held responsible for its contents. One of the oldest and worst lightning strikes ever recorded happened in the town of Brescia, Italy, in 1769. "She changed the words and it's got the same kind of feel, but it's mixed slightly more as a single. The drums would go down live and then be bounced to one track and he'd use the other seven tracks to fill with whatever he could. "The other problem was that some of the stuff actually survived from the very first demo sessions that we did, so the drums for instance on 'Junior Kickstart' survived from the very first time he put it down. So it was kind of remote mixing. To control that is the biggest nightmare. Lightning is a major hazard that claims many lives every year, the WMO said. Team sessions found Ian Parton bravely attempting to engineer and record everything himself at the Partons' parents home in Wales. We had a musicologist come down to the studio and we sat here going through all the samples and he would go 'Nah... nah... can't do that... gotta change that.' Learn how thunderstorms form, what causes lightning and thunder, and how these violent phenomena help balance the planet's energy and electricity. The following are some of the most well-known lightning strikes on record. Too right. "On the original version, all the vocals were samples," Gareth reveals, carefully. If the process of recreating the legally cleaned-up version of Thunder, Lightning, Strike was a convoluted affair, then the mix stage of the album's second incarnation provided further complications: Ian Parton was off on tour with the live line-up of the Go! The utility company supplying New York City at the time was “Consolidated Edison”, located in Westchester County. For the catchy proto-rap rhymes of 'Bottle Rocket', the Go! Recorded in a garage in Swansea, mixed almost entirely in mono and offering a headspinning brew of Northern soul, electro, cheerleader chants, Charlie Brown-styled piano and abrasive, Sonic Youth-inspired loops, the Go! ", Most of the basic tracks for Thunder, Lightning, Strike were recorded at the Partons' Swansea family home, using a Soundtracs desk and an eight-track Otari reel-to-reel. The Longest Lightning Bolt Ever Recorded Stretched 200 Miles. If you're listening to loud, distorted music all day, I can't do it on NS10s. Fortress's Yamaha NS10 and Genelec 1030A monitors: Gareth Parton says he prefers the latter for most mixing tasks. "The new 'cheerleader' vocals had to sound like they were taken off VHS, so I did just that. "Also, when that was transferred over, the Otari eight-track has a tendency to drift with the tempo, so the tuning across the whole thing was a bit strange. While the range of instrumentation on Thunder, Lightning, Strike is fairly eclectic — including banjo, recorder and pub piano (as recorded, quite literally on 'Hold Yr Terror Close', in a Brighton bar) — it's perhaps Ian Parton's idiosyncratic selection of samples that really defines the sound of the album. "There's quite a lot of tape processing going on throughout everything. "But because it went out on a small indie and we thought it wouldn't do anything, none of the samples were cleared. ", From top: Amek dual compressor/limiters (x2), Antares AVP1 vocal processor, Drawmer 1960 voice channel, Valley People Dynamite compressor, Dbx 902 de-essers (x2) and 160X compressors (x2).