What is the secret to capturing a great band in the studio?
What you have to remember is that records like Highway to Hell, Back in Black and Led Zeppelin II — any of those records that have that energy and freshness to them — really all of that is generated by the band. The band is in a position and a time in their career and life where they're creating that kind of energy in the music that they play. Really, what I did was NOT do something — what I didn't do was lose that. What I was able to do was recognize what the excitement was, try and capture that excitement and take that forward. I don't think you can engineer musical excitement into a record. I think that you can create some kind of audio excitement, but it's a different kind of excitement — the sort of excitement that you get from a Prodigy record, which is just as electric, just as exciting as some of those AC/DC records, but it's generated in a different way. It's generated from the beats, the tempos and the intensity of the sounds and then augmented by the excitement of the vocal. But it isn't organic like an AC/DC record.
What could get in the way of capturing the excitement of a great band?
It's not as simple as having the band play live while you capture it. You hear a lot of artists say they're great live, but they've never been able to capture it in the studio. Part of the reason is that they've not taken the time or trouble to prepare their music to be recorded. If you want to make a live recording, then make the live recording. But, you have to remember that it's going to have to be twice as large as life. If you take away the visual experience of the live performance and the intensity of it being live, then all you've got is the music. At the end of the day it's got to be a pretty damn good performance. If you then try to take that into a studio and you don't adapt the music to contend with the environment you're recording in, you're probably not going to end up with a particularly good recording.
It's not as simple as throwing up some well-placed, high-quality mics?
I think that most of the important choices that make a successful recording should be made before you get into the studio. The choice of the studio room that you're going to go into has a huge effect on how the artist will react to being in the studio. You can put the most exciting artist in the world in a really bad environment that they don't respond to, and they're not going to play very well. If they don't play well, you're not going to get much of a recording. If you have a good environment with good musicians who are capable of playing well, it makes me sound good.
I wanted to ask you about working with Bob Marley and The Wailers.
I did all the overdubbing on Catch a Fire of [John] "Rabbit" [Bundrick, keys], Wayne Perkins [guitar] — all those extra overdubs — and then I mixed it. Then I did a larger portion of the recording on the Burnin' album and I mixed some of it. The Catch a Fire recordings were all done on 8-track [in Jamaica]. On a lot of songs, I had all the drums on one track or the drum top kit on one track, the bass drum and the bass on another track and the guitars and keyboards mixed together on one track. There were a lot of things that were fixed the way they were. It was a recording that we just added bits to — very straightforward. People have said to me, "Did you know it was a classic album when you were making it?" Of course you don't. It's kind of a ridiculous question in a way. It sounds strange. I suppose that there was so much great music that we were privileged to work with at that point in time that you get slightly blasé about it. There was all this stuff going on around you — great musicians that were coming in and playing on each other's stuff. Rabbit was almost part of a house band that existed at [Island's] Basing Street Studios. He was playing on loads of different projects. He was always around the studio and so were these other great players. When I got to record the Burnin' album, I was scared because I'd never recorded any reggae music the way that they recorded it in Jamaica. I was aware of the fact that there was something about the bass sound that was quite special, so I asked Bunny Wailer, "How do you record this stuff in Jamaica?" He said, "We put the drums in the middle of the room and point everybody at it." Suddenly it dawned on me that they actually used the leakage in the different instruments to good effect. I still have a copy of a multitrack of one of those recordings — when you listen to just the bass sound by itself it sounds absolutely terrible!
"You can put the most exciting artist in the world in a really bad environment that they don't respond to, and they're not going to play very well."
The bass track?
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Yeah, on Catch a Fire's "Stir it Up," the bass track sounds horrible. It sounds like a rubber band. But you put the drums and the other instruments in, and the little bit of bass that's coming from those other instruments all of a sudden starts to fill it out, and then eventually you realize you've got this massive bass sound that's coming right across the whole stereo spectrum.
How would you normally go about tracking bass? More of a DI or a mic?
Always a blend of the two. I have this tendency to record bass with three microphones, or two microphones and a DI. I like to keep them on separate tracks. That started with Thin Lizzy. Phil Lynott had this bass rig where he had a massive, great Acoustic 361 amp, a 4-by-4 cabinet with a Hiwatt head and a Rickenbacker stereo bass. He took the two bass outputs and put one of them through the big, low bass rig and the other one through the guitar one. He'd overdrive the guitar rig so that you'd have all this bottom end and then you'd have this biting middle going on — I just thought that was so cool. It was so much easier than having one amplifier and one microphone. I started experimenting with putting two microphones on a bass cabinet in different positions and how I could treat them differently and get different aspects of the bass. It's so much easier to take two microphone sources that are presenting me with the parts of the sound that you'd really like to have and mixing those two together, rather than taking one microphone source and EQ'ing the hell out of it. It continually reinforces my belief that you need to start as close to the sound that you want to be achieving most of the time, if you want to get those organic sounds. If you want to move into the area of sound design, then you're talking about different construction.
The energy that you're talking about that you can capture when a band is excited and playing live in a room together — that's the beautiful mystery of a great band.
It's a moment. The reason I think the environment is so important is if a band is in a room, they are playing and they're feeling good in that room, and what they're hearing in that room, whether it's through the earphones or acoustically, is giving them a buzz. Most musicians — if you ask them, "What are the best moments?" you quite often get the answer, "When I'm up on stage and the gig is going really, really well, and I can hear everything that's happening. That lifts me. Then I play better, and because I'm playing better, then everything sounds better." If you can hit that cycle, that just becomes self-fulfilling.
I heard AC/DC didn't like to wear headphones in the studio.
They wore headphones. There are so many myths. It's very much this kind of searching for this secret key that will unlock these recordings. I sometimes find it very difficult thinking back to these recordings, because I certainly wasn't paying enough attention — I was just doing it. For me to go back and analyze precisely what it was about them is almost impossible. My recall is that there would be some songs where they might wear their headphones and some songs where they wouldn't wear their headphones. Cliff [Williams, bass] and Phil [Rudd, drums] would have headphones on most of the time. We obviously did for overdubbing vocals.
How did you get the drum sounds while mixing AC/DC's Highway to Hell?
I didn't do the basic recording for Highway to Hell, but it was done in a very dead studio [Roundhouse Studios]. The recordings were very good, but they were very dry, and there was no leakage between the drums and guitar — there was a lot of separation going on. What I really needed to do was stick the elements together. We put a couple of Altec speakers up in the studio — something that I'd done before — and I just used those instead of using chambers or echo plates. We used that to create a room sound.
For everything or just for the drums?
Mostly it was just some of the components of the drums, but I put bits of guitar in there as well.
What room was that?
It was Island — Basing Street Studio Two. I did most of my early recording in that room.
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It's a pretty big, ambient room?
It's a small room, but it's a room where a lot of great rock records have been made. Free had done quite a lot of recording in there. Spooky Tooth, Traffic, The Grease Band, Black Sabbath, Stephen Stills and Jimi Hendrix had recorded in that room. It was a great little rock room — had a tight, ambient sound, and it was identifiable that it was a space.
That's true — it doesn't have that unusable room mic sound that you can get in a lot of big rooms.
I've just been mixing an album that has lots and lots of ambient tracks available. It's very tempting to shove those ambient tracks up and it sounds absolutely huge. You put everything else in and you realize there's no real relationship. You've got a drum kit that was playing in isolation to everybody else — sometimes it's better to control that ambience a bit more.
With AC/DC's Back in Black you were in on it from the start, and you were Mutt Lange's right hand guy, right? Were you in on pre-production?
