After a five-year absence -- a miniature eternity in the music business -- Gary Numan is back. Currently touring to support his new album, Jagged, the New Wave icon has proven he can still confound expectations. His darker, moodier path may be a surprise for fans expecting a reprise of hits like "Cars." Numan was gracious enough to take a few minutes before his show at the House of Blues to talk to Gearwire about his technical approach to the new album, his surprisingly minimal mic setup, and his experiences doing some do-it-yourself repair on a broken-down synth.

Analog keyboard worshippers may be surprised to learn Numan doesn't share the analog purist's love of "the good old stuff". Rather than hang on to old keyboards he used in the making of albums such as The Pleasure Principle, Numan has changed with the times. For Jagged, the studio setup was based around the Access Virus TI, MOTU MachFive software, and other modern technology combined with Pro Tools. This is par for the course for most modern acts with a heavy emphasis on electronics, but those who have followed Numan's career would probably assume his studio is full of old Moog gear, SH-101s, and Roland Juno products. Of his old keyboards, he says, "I've only got one, in the garage, and it's covered in rat shit!"

In the studio, Numan's song ideas are fleshed out long before they become subject to technology. He complains of some modern music which has plenty of flash, but lacks substance. For him, once the newness on such material is gone, there's nothing left. "There seems to be a fair amount of music around which sounds great when you hear it, then you hear it two or three times and there isn't actually any melody there. There is no tune to sing. It's almost like there's icing on the cake, but there's no cake."

Numan's technique involves getting the song into a coherent form, then applying many layers. "Songs are written on the piano, with a basic loop going in the background. You get your basic arrangements and melodies sorted in the most basic format." He said, "Underneath all the gloss that is going to come later, you have a [solid] song, with a melody that is memorable and an arrangement which has dynamics and is interesting and makes sense. Then you layer on the glossy bits, the production." Numan said.

"Jagged was a lot of work. It doesn't always sound as complicated as it seemed when you actually made it." Some parts of the album were layered with more than sixty tracks. "I'd say about 75 percent of the work on Jagged was done in manipulating sound rather than writing parts."

Vocals

In contrast to the lavish attention on his songwriting, Gary Numan is a minimalist as a singer. When asked what gear he prefers, Numan laughed, appearing a bit embarrassed by his no-nonsense approach. "I use an SM-58. That's it! Forty-nine pounds, ninety-nine pence." He adds, "There is no cleverness going on at all. I use very standard Pro Tools in-built reverbs and the delay that comes with it, pitch plug-in just to give me a little up-and-down split. That's it, absolutely no special gear, no special compressors. Just get in there, sing it, get out."

Numan also confessed to an even less glamorous mic setup. "Most of Jagged, was done with a sock wrapped around, because I lost my "pop shield". We moved house and the pop shield went missing. So I took my sock off in the studio, and wrapped it round the end, and nine of the songs on Jagged were done with a sock wrapped round the end of an SM-58! I don't have a great amount of, [laughs] trickery to talk about with vocals."

Listening to the new album, the results are definitely there, regardless of the low-tech approach to Numan's vocals. "I don't know how I get away with it, actually. People say, 'oh you need this mic and that mic, and you need one in front and one over there.' All this phenomenal technique! No you don't, you need an SM-58 with a sock wrapped round the end of it!" Numan adds, "It'll be just as good once you tweak this and tweak that a little bit, and no one would know that I sing into a sock. Not by listening, anyway."

Equipment

Live performances are hard on any gear, but keyboards can be especially problematic. Numan says when his equipment starts failing on tour, he takes the direct approach. "We had a synth go down in the first gig actually, so three of us got together, took it apart and started looking for things that looked out of place." Numan's synth surgery consisted of a lot of experimentation. He describes it as a repair-by-committee situation. "There's a wire there, where do you think that should go?" He said, "How long is it? Well, stick it on that, then. Oh, that works!"

Having any amount hardware means dealing with such repair issues, but another problem is the noise generated by any number of keyboards, guitar pedals, and other electronics. Numan says his equipment list keeps getting smaller, thanks to soft synths and plugins. "Every wire you get rid of is a certain amount of noise generated less than otherwise, and I'm all in favor of that." He said. "It's a very simple system, I seem to be able to get rid of gear and not really miss it. It's pretty much a studio in a box."

Gary Numan's return to the stage and studio isn't so much a re-invention of himself as a redefinition. The "future now" lyrics of his earlier work have given way to more personal writing; on stage, where Numan once appeared aloof and detached, he now appears more animated and completely absorbed in his performances. During Numan's live performance of "Down In The Park" in the cult concert film Urgh! A Music War he seems almost immobilized compared to his highly energetic show at the Chicago House Of Blues during his tour in support of Jagged.

The old Numan sound was sharp and angular; it probably owed at least a small debt to the technology that created such sounds. The new approach is more enveloping. It surrounds the listener on all sides with smoother textures punctuated by Numan's trademark synth-and-guitar . While he says his song creation is "more a head thing than a technology thing," he acknowledges that today's samplers, software tools and highly evolved hardware synths go a long way towards helping translate the music in his head onto compact disc.