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five years pass...
This is just an insane way to make a record. I'm kind of surprised with all of the CPU power people have now you don't have more people at home just doing this kind of schizo band production (but hey maybe that's the next thing).
http://mixonline.com/mag/audio_mike_shipley_having/
There was a sound of the records in the Def Leppard era that was conceptualized between Mutt and myself. We'd have to invent types of drum sounds, because his thing was always, "Let's do something different. It can't ever be the same, it can't ever be just a boring drum sound, it has to be Star Wars! Everyone is watching Star Wars films and seeing things that are very three dimensional, so let's not just have this little honky drum sound that everyone goes for. Let's make it big, different, larger than life."
Larger than life is the definition of those records. It seems impossible that anybody could get so much top, so much bottom, so many effects, so many parts-so much of everything-crammed onto a piece of tape.
Mutt was just brilliant. There's so much depth of field to the way he produced those records in terms of the parts. The concept of how to make the drums sound and how to make the guitars sound and how to stack up hundreds of tracks of backgrounds. There were so many layers-it would take huge amounts of time to be as experimental as you could possibly be and then to start again and try a different approach altogether, let alone the time it would take to mix!
You were some of the first people experimenting with sampled drums. On Hysteria those huge drums were all samples, played in a Fairlight.
Lots of people didn't know that. They were always asking me how I miked up such great drums! Pyromania was done the same way, on cheesy 8-bit Fairlight technology where we had to figure out how to record everything at half speed into the Fairlight to make it sound like it had some tone to it, and we'd be stacking up a bunch of snares and bass drums.
I remember at the beginning of Pyromania there was no idea of how we were going to do the drums. All Mutt was saying was that we'd have to figure out some way to do the drums in the end. The drums would be one of the last things to get done, so it was, "Wonder how we're gonna do them. I'm sure we'll figure out something."
A very simple drumbeat would go down at the beginning, but at the time, there wasn't any way of locking multitracks up with drum machines. There was no way to sync the Fairlights up to SMPTE. So we had to figure out how to do that because we had to be able to change the parts. You could put a drum machine part down and work to it, but there was just that Linn drum code, and it didn't run anything but itself, so we had to figure out, with the help of some pretty smart technical people, how to get a system together to sync to tape.
The main reason the drums were done that way was because, at that point, the songs and the arrangements would be changing all the time. If you had a performance and Mutt and the band decided to rewrite the chorus, whatever the guy had been playing became irrelevant. So the best way was for them to keep working on the songs, rearranging them and changing them all the time, and then to worry about what the drums should do afterwards.
It seems like these projects took on a life of their own, almost like they couldn't be controlled.
It was never out of control with Mutt, but because he's so involved in the whole process, he'd get to a stage where you had a song finished, we thought-we'd busted our balls, spending days on guitar sounds, days on vocal sounds-and he'd change the chorus.
But see, there's no sense having an attitude or ever thinking for even a second that having an attitude is going to do anything but make the process really hard for anybody else. All having an attitude will do is get in the way of what the rest of the process is supposed to be, which is people like Mutt and whoever is in the band getting what they want. It's my job to have no attitude and say, "No problem. I'll figure out how to do it," and then to do it.
― earlnash, Wednesday, 27 February 2013 23:55 (eleven years ago) link
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