Chic's Studio Methods And Style

Although it didn't happen instantaneously Chic evolved as an r&b band with influences ranging from jazz, funk, rock and, yes, even disco! Rodgers and Edwards' songwriting partnership was driven by Rodgers, as most of the songs' initial sketches came from him. Edwards would then add his ideas and the songs would come together. It sometimes worked the other way around, but this was not usual.

The duo were also the core of the music. Arguably, the most recognisable facet of the Chic sound is Rodgers' rhythm guitar. His guitar of choice has long been the 'Hitmaker', a 1960 Fender Stratocaster with a '59 neck. He spoke to Amit Sharma for Guitar World in October 2020 about how he settled on it as his go-to guitar:

I was basically a jazz and classical player, to begin with. The speed I could achieve using my fingers, I couldn't achieve with a pick. I found it easier with my hands. Bernard was a really funk-oriented guy, and he hated my sound with the big, fat, jazzy guitar (a Gibson Barney Kessel). He'd say it fed back too much, and, therefore, you couldn't play it loud, etc. There was an opening act on our tour and I let their guitarist use my equipment. He was playing a Stratocaster and was really chugging on it. That's when I realised what Bernard was trying to get me to do. He talked me into buying a Strat, so I did. And that was the Hitmaker, bought in 1973 from a little pawn shop in Florida.

As for effects pedals, Rodgers admitted: 'I'm quite simple; my pedalboard only has three things on it - a chorus, a wah and maybe an overdrive, which I don't really use.' Rodgers' tone was, and still is, usually clean and bright with a focus on the high and high-mid tones.

Bernard Edwards's formidable bass playing, although not always as instantly recognisable, was almost as key to the Chic sound as Rodgers' guitar. For the first Chic album, he used a Precision bass, swapping over to a 1977 Music Man Stingray (with round wound strings) for every album after that. Rodgers explained his partner's unusual technique to Bass Player in November 2023:

Bernard was a guitar player before he played the bass guitar. But the last thing he wanted to be was a bass player who used a pick. So he played with his forefinger and thumb as if he were holding a pick. He'd strike the string with the bottom and top of his finger. The strength of the low-end comes from his thumb on top and the other three fingers curled up underneath, so he had the fattest pick you could ever imagine!

The third man in the expanded rhythm department was their powerhouse drummer. Tony Thompson had to adapt quickly to the wishes of Rodgers and Edwards, moreso the former. He explained to Modern Drummer in 2002:

When I first joined, Nile was like: 'Why do you need all those cymbals and stuff?' He would tell Bernard, 'The brother plays way too much.' So Bernard took me under his wing. He told me: 'Get rid of all that shit. Just keep a bass drum, snare and hi-hat. When you master that, then maybe I'll add another cymbal or drum.' So, I was spoon-fed my kit. But it worked. It's amazing how creative you get from boredom. You come up with all these different things. Nile and Bernard saw a lot of things in me that I didn't see in myself. They helped me immensely in learning to groove.

Also contributing backing tracks were Rob Sabino (keyboards) and Sammy Figueroa (percussion).

The band moved fast when recording. It's known, for instance, that the backing tracks on C'est Chic and We Are Family were all done within the same two weeks. Percussionist Sammy Figueroa recalls: 'We all played together like we were playing a concert. The studio was completely open and a lot of those songs were done in one take.' Rodgers expanded on this to Sound On Sound in April 2005: 'The rhythm track was always played completely live, without a click track, and we'd select one particular take. No song that we ever recorded was compiled from different takes. We knew which take it was because that's the one we kept.' Once the 'best' rhythm track, which also included Rodgers' rhythm guitar and often keyboards, was selected, they would swiftly move on to overdubs and vocals. It was common for them to record all the strings and brass in two or three days, with any other instrumental overdubs and all of the vocals taking about the same length of time.

As as writing the material and playing on it, Rodgers and Edwards also produced the records, sometimes with assistance. A key man in the studio on most of the early Chic Organisation records was the legendary Bob Clearmountain, who has worked on many massive hit albums. Crispin Cioe caught up with him for High Fidelity in September 1979. He explained how they got the sounds down:

With Chic, I go for a live sound that is recorded very cleanly. Bernard and Nile will rarely use all 24 tracks on their tunes, and we try to do as much live playing as possible. I close-mic the instruments, with 12 to 16 mics on the drums alone, so we get virtually no leakage. We also get a tight sound in the small room and they're playing live, with each other.

The Chic Organisation also wrote, played on and produced many records for other artists. Rodgers explained their philosophy on these projects to Freeze Frame in 1981: 'We have a certain formula for doing what we do. However, we absolutely write and produce differently for each one of those artists. We have to understand these people's artistry and try to develop that with our interpretation of them.' Once they had settled on the songs and recorded the backing tracks, they would bring in the artists to sing. Rodgers commented to Sound On Sound in April 2005:

We never did guide vocals, and no vocalists ever heard the song before they recorded any of our records, even if they were stars. Hearing these records for the first time, the artists were excited by them and wanted to prove they could do a good job. That made them concentrate and give a fresh, exciting performance. At the same time, the way Bernard and I worked with vocalists, we'd really coach and push them. We had a very definite idea as to what kind of vocal we needed.

Rodgers is 'forgetting' there that Fonzi Thornton (regular backing/harmony singer) recorded guide vocals for Diana Ross and Johnny Mathis at least. There were some stars you clearly didn't spring a vocal on, but Sister Sledge and Norma Jean Wright were among those who did record vocals with no prior knowledge of the song.

The final track selection and sequencing had a formula, as Rodgers partly explained to Sound On Sound in April 2005:

The concept of a Chic album is that we're the opening act for a really big star, and we're unknown. No-one has ever heard of us; we're brand new and we're a live band coming out on stage to tell everybody who we are. So, there's always a song on the album that announces we're Chic - on the first album, it's 'Strike Up The Band'; on the second, it's 'Chic Cheer', and so on. The concept is that we're an r&b band playing live for an old-time r&b audience. They came to see the star, but the opening act was important, too, so the opening act had to put on a really good show.

As well as the albums, a key facet of their success was the huge hit singles - a sparkling array of gems recorded under their own name and for other artists. A facet they had in common was opening with the chorus. It set the songs up immediately, straight into the hook, and made for an interesting dynamic of shifting to the verse rather than vice versa. Another key feature, more often used in the album tracks, was the 'breakdown', where the song was stripped down to the basics and built back up again. These are some of the finest passages in Chic's output.

If there was a weakness to the songs, then it was definitely the lyrics. But the feel and emotion in the vocals were usually more than enough to compensate.

The groove and feel of their songs often saw them categorised as a disco band. Initially, they had embraced it because - as Rodgers told James Truman of Melody Maker in 1979 - 'Disco gave us the perfect opportunity to realise our concept because it wasn't about being black, white, male or female. Furthermore, it would give us a chance to get into the mainstream.' Edwards had been less keen, admitting to Truman: 'I realised if we did it our way, it'd be pretty good.'

The links to disco didn't take long, two years at most, to prove a problem. The sometimes derogatory press inferences about their quality and musical credibility rightly infuriated them. Edwards indignantly made it clear to Danny Baker in New Musical Express in January 1979 that the band had musical chops: 'The two of us, with our drummer Tony Thompson, could walk into a studio and sweat off some stuff that could floor these so-called serious music guys.' But the band, in essence, were all about the groove. Within that, there was still room for dazzling musical passages and solos. There was more going on in the likes of 'Good Times' or 'I Want Your Love' than much of the material in the disco genre that hit the...