Inside the Studio

It's the volcano that finally does for them. Hurricane Hugo, the tropical cyclone which struck in 1989 had been bad enough, of course, wiping out whole villages, cutting off all power supplies, tearing the roof off 90% of the buildings, killing ten and seriously injuring 89 citizens, and making 11,000 of the island's 12,000 population effectively homeless.

His ultimate weapon was silence. Which was weird considering his vocation in life was managing musicians. Don't get me wrong, Albert could curse and scream and bully and belittle with the best of them, but when all the histrionics were getting him nowhere he'd just clam up and stare like a statue. For a very long time. Which usually freaked everyone out and then, of course, they'd accede and he'd get what he came for.

Not wishing to teach anyone's grandma to suck eggs, but it might be worth beginning by having a quick look at Dolby Atmos. A surround sound technology reasonably recently developed by US company Dolby – or 'Dobly' if you're a Spinal Tap fan – it's a system that allows sounds to be moved as objects in a three-dimensional space, coming atcha from above, behind, inside, outside... everywhere.

There were pieces of me laying all over the floor.' That's how David Bowie remembered 1976. Living – though that's hardly the word – on a diet of milk, red peppers and cocaine, every successive alias he ditched – Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, The Thin White Duke, The Man Who Fell To Earth – had been like shedding a layer of skin. And now, what's left of him is a skeletal ghost, a fading shadow of his former selves.

So, here's how you do it. Take two synchronised tape copies of a finished recording and play them simultaneously into a third master recorder, all the while manually retarding the rotation of one of the two tape reels by pressing on the flanges, manipulating the phase difference between the two sources. Easy-peasy. Now you can flange.

Dolly was in one heck of a hurry. She was running late for a recording session and if there was one thing that Dolly wasn't ever, it was late. Not only that, this was her debut appointment at Nashville's RCA Studios and she didn't want them thinking bad of her for being tardy.

You may have read recently about the discovery of a British warship that sank in 1682 off our eastern coast which is being hailed by those who know as the 'most significant historic maritime discovery since the raising of the Mary Rose in 1982'. Well, happy as I am for Her Majesty's hyped-up historians, there's another treasure trove currently being examined that, for me, knocks that watery wreck into a cocked hat.