From: frnk@cs1.bradley.edu (Paul Ondercin)
Subject: Re: type of piano/instruments used
Organization: Bradley University
Date: 10 Sep 92 18:35:03 GMT

In <1992Sep10.164834.12734@meaddata.com> nick@meaddata.com (Nick Gough) writes:

>What type of piano & other musical instruments does Enya & her musicians use?

>Hope that I get a straight answer...
   Here comes one. This is Enya Paper #12...

---START PAPER CUT---

Subject: The Enya Papers (12)
From: P Warburton <pwarburt@uk.co.ibmpcug>
To: D.R.Allum@uk.ac.bath.gdr
Message-Id: <9202272302.AA28758@ibmpcug.co.uk>
Date: 27 Feb 92 23:02:05 GMT (Thu)


A more technical article this time. In the issue dated December 1988, 
_International Musician and Recording World_ visited Enya for their 
column "Home Taping".

(Reproduced without permission)

---

Home Taping (is skill in music)

Andrew Smith travels to Dublin to meet Enya, Ireland's latest musical 
export, in her home studio...


You don't hear music like Enya's every day. Her new album, _Watermark_, 
stayed on my turntable for weeks after I first heard it. Like all good 
things, Enya's music isn't easy to describe. Dense and frail at the 
same time, it deals in atmosphere and mood, expressed through a voice 
so crystalline that it almost hurts. One of the reviews suggested that 
it might be quintessential CD music, but that seems to me to miss the 
point completely.

Christened Eithne Ni Bhraonain, Enya left school to join the family 
band, Clannad, eventually tiring of being the little sister, and so 
leaving to work on her own music. Along the way, she composed the music 
to film mogul David Puttnam's _Frog Prince_ and the BBC series _The 
Celts_, worked with Sinead O'Connor and eventually landed a record deal 
with WEA, almost by chance, through sitting next to the MD (who was 
familiar with her work) at an awards ceremony.

Enya's music is created and demo'd at a studio in the quiet Dublin 
house she shares with her manager/producer Nicky Ryan and press 
officer/lyricist Roma. It's an enclosed, private world, which you can 
feel in the music produced there. Built with money from the _Frog 
Prince_, the studio is based round a desk (24:8:6) which was custom 
built for Nicky in the days when he was doing the live sound for 
Clannad. "I wanted the warmth of a Neve, with the best of SSL eq."

The unusual thing about it is that the eq is at the front of the desk, 
so within easy hand reach. The machine is the trusty Fostex E16 ("an 
incredible machine - as good in quality terms as most 24 tracks, but 
you'll find that most engineers feel obliged to say it's worse"). For 
monitoring, there's a pair of Yamaha NS10Ms, but these don't in fact 
get used much.

"I mainly monitor on these Kef hi fi speakers, because they're truer to 
the room. There's a pair of Urei model 809s here, but they're almost 
too good; you'd almost want to build a room around them."

Outboard gear is kept to a functional minimum; two MIDIverb IIs ("I 
prefer them to the super duper machines"), an ATC Q1 reverb and a 
Roland SDE-1000 digital delay. Nicky uses no compression whatsoever, 
preferring to let the music breathe freely, saying:

"It's time engineers got back to listening to sounds and not flavour of 
the month. I wish they'd stop reading Studio Sound for awhile. It 
pisses me off."

Nicky and Enya build up the huge vocal swathes which are so much a 
feature of the sound, by patiently layering sometimes dozens of tracks, 
bouncing them onto a Sony F1 and then spinning them back in. Many 
engineers remain unconvinced by the F1 but, as with everything, Nicky 
is practical and philosophical about this.

"The F1's better than DAT because it has an accurate pause button, even 
though the DAT sounds better."

Enya sings through a Sennheiser MKH 40 P48, which is prone to popping, 
but valued for its absolute transparency. The acoustic instruments, 
such as Davey Spillane's haunting bagpipes and flutes, are handled with 
a Sony ECM50 - a relatively inexpensive mike, as it happens. Engineers 
often complain about having to record the more exotic acoustic 
instruments such as the Celtic ones used here, but Nicky insists that,

"There has to be a microphone to suit every instrument. It's all to do 
with placement. If an engineer tells you he can't get a good sound with 
a particular instrument, he's lying."


_Water_Music_

Enya seems immediately much more at home when she's in the studio 
talking than when she's outside of it. Composing the music is a lonely, 
absorbing process.

"I usually work with the D50, and I have a microphone in front of me, 
just putting down ideas on my own (TEAC) four-track. I'm just recording 
at random. Even ideas that I don't know what to do with, they always 
come in handy somewhere, maybe as a middle eight or the start of 
another piece. I have to keep working all the time."

So Enya sits in the studio, chained to the D50, an old Juno 60 - used 
mainly for its arpeggiator (check out _Storms In Africa_) - and a 
Yamaha KX88 master keyboard, until a complete piece (solos and all) is 
written, at which point Nicky joins her and they commit to tape. 
Sometimes this takes weeks, sometimes a couple of days, as in the case 
of the B-side to the single _Orinoco Flow_.

"It was done in a couple of days, because time was so short. I had 
written it in A, but the uillean piper can't play in A, so I had to 
transpose it down to G, so I had a guide down for him in G, and on the 
day he was arriving, I said to Nicky, "Oh dear, I don't like G at all", 
so we decided on the spot to transpose it again to C. So I had a couple 
of hours to put down the guide, but in fact that became the lead vocal, 
because the feeling was so strong for me: the song's in Gaelic, and 
it's about my grandparents and their influence on me. So I went to put 
down the guide, and when I stopped, that was it, it was the lead vocal, 
because the feeling was there. It's rough, but the feeling in it was so 
good. I was very happy with that."

Gaelic is actually Enya's first language, although it's only used on 
one of the songs on the album, _Na Laetha Geal M'oige_. The soundtrack 
to _The Celts_, however, was different.

"There's a sound in the Gaelic section, Scots Gaelic (which is very 
close Irish Gaelic). They do what are called Waulking songs. They're 
very rhythmic: Irish music isn't rhythmic at all, it's very open. But 
for _The Celts_, we wanted something very rhythmic, and we used Scots 
Gaelic Waulking songs. It's all sounds, it doesn't mean anything, but 
when all the women are working, weaving or whatever, they sing these. 
It's like Blues, it's just a rhythm that helps them when they're 
working. I use these in _The Longships_ on _Watermark_ too."

You'll be hearing a lot more of Enya in the near future, a fact which 
proves once and for all that, in the English record companies' search 
for "world music", they need so often look no further than their back 
door.

Andrew Smith

--- End of quoted material ---

I corrected some obvious errors in copying the text. In particular, 
Andrew Smith must have mis-heard Nicky Ryan's first name, as he refers 
consistently to "Micky". "Uillean" got rendered phonetically as 
"Elland". I don't know enough about the recording industry to recognise 
errors in the technicalities, so it wouldn't surprise me if there are a 
few of those.

One other correction I made, after much thought, was to change "Scotch 
Gaelic" to "Scots Gaelic". The Scottish people seem to prefer the 
adjectives "Scots" or "Scottish", reserving "Scotch" for a few time-
honoured expressions such as Scotch whisk(e)y, Scotch broth and Scotch 
mist. Whatever the correct usage might be in this case, I'm sure Enya 
got it right, but I'm far from sure that Smith would have heard her 
correctly, and he evidently didn't check *any* spellings.

Smith neglected to mention the title of the B-side of the _Orinoco Flow_
single, perhaps understandably in view of his difficulty with
spellings; it's _Smaointe... D'Aodh Agus Do Mha'ire Ui' Dhu'gain_, 
which also appears on the expensive imported Japanese CD _6 Tracks_ and 
is the last track on _Shepherd Moons_.

_Na Laetha Geal M'oige_ is not in fact the only Gaelic track on 
_Watermark_, as fans will know. Apart from _The Longships_, which may 
consist of meaningless phrases, but they are _Gaelic_ meaningless 
phrases, there's also _Storms In Africa_.

Peter Warburton
pwarburt@ibmpcug.co.uk


---END OF PAPER CUT---

   Hope this helps!

	 Frnk! :>  (Lagged with classwork)

--
frnk@bucs1.bradley.edu, frnk@camelot.bradley.edu, am417@cleveland.freenet.Edu

   At night, more often than not, they would congregate in the dark beyond her
window and laugh about her. Usually the laughter would give way to insult. She
paid them no mind. If they grew too damaging, the farm boy handled things,
emerging silently from his hovel, thrashing a few of them, sending them flying.
                                              - _The Princess Bride_
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