 other because you start doing the same things. Which isn’t negative, it just the way it is. I always hope at the end of any project, doesn’t matter what it is, that you have learned something. Even if it was how to shut-up, sit down, and be quiet or something, you learn how to do that.
Do you have a particular approach to getting an electric guitar sound?
Well, yes, and it is very simple. When I was a kid it was the hippie thing. Someone would bring their amplifier and their guitar and you’d think, “That’s what he means to sound like? I’d better make it sound okay.” Well the drum kit would be struggling to get a sound and it wouldn’t be there, and you would think that it was your fault. It took me years to realize, “Wait a minute, the gear they got is just not fuckin’ right.”
For electric guitar sounds I quite often use 2 [Shure] SM57’s — one straight on and one at a 45-degree angle. So you don’t have to find a sweet spot for the EQ. Or, I might use a Neumann U47 and a Sennheiser MD 421-- whatever is good that day. It’s what’s coming out of the amplifier, pal. If you have the world’s greatest stereo system on the planet and you put a shitty program through it, it sounds like shit. If it is horrible, you can EQ it and compress it and do anything you want, but you’re just fuckin’ a turd, you know.
What are you working on now?
Well, I just finished a record with L.A. Guns and I am about to start with this band called Asthma in New York. They are very cool. I just did a 5.1 with The Cult, a live record. They just split up, so I am probably going to be doing a record with Ian, the singer. They are casting around for musicians right now. Ian Ashbury from The Cult is a really good poet and a really good lad, too. I like him, and he’s English. I don’t get to work with English people very much. Yeah, always fuckin’ Americans. Which is why I came here. The home of rock ’n roll, man.
It is unusual to hear an Englishman admit that.
Oh, good Lord. Do you remember when Eric [Clapton] was playing with Delaney and Bonnie? I was working with all these English bands, Free and Traffic and Blind Faith, Ten Years After. There was some serious blues going on, but it would seem to take a long time to get to the growth. Delaney and Bonnie, who were playing with Jimmy Gordon, Carl Rydel, Bobby Whitlock, Jim Price and Bobby Keys playing horns, would walk in the room and it was like turning a fucking light switch. Instant groove. I thought, “Jesus Christ, these guys are professionals!” It doesn’t take them an hour to get into it or two hash joints to get there. They’d just — bing — and there it was. They’d say, “Hey did you get that?” And I thought, “Fuckin’ hell! It’s true. It’s the real thing.”
including iconic albums from the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin.
You have to record from the first take, huh?
Well, yes. You have to be quick. I always used to like lazy rock ’n roll. The Stones they don’t show up till midnight, you have been sitting there since two in the afternoon. Nothing gets done for days at a time. Then Delaney and Bonnie came on they changed the whole scene. Those people from that rhythm section played on a lot of records in two years —All Things Must Pass, George’s [Harrison] big quadruple record, and Gary Wright, with millions of things, and the horn section in London, which impressed Bobby Keys. I learned from them, and I thought, “Hell, why are they coming here? I wanna go there.”
I came over here in 1970, because I was working with Jimmy Miller and he was an American who had a production company out here. The studios were a little behind the times, though. When I was mixing “Stairway to Heaven” over at Sunset Sound and I wanted to pan something, I said, “You don’t have pan pots on the channels.” They responded, “We have a pan pot. Bring on the pan pot!” They bring out this guy on a gurney, you know? A big box with a huge knob, a pan pot man. Christ, the Americans sent someone to the moon, but they only had one pan pot. It was like having one meatball. You can have all the bread you want, but only with one meatball.
Is it true that you have used Universal Audio’s 1176 on most, if not all, of the records you have done in the last thirty years?
Since you guys came out with the device, I have used them on every record since.
If I am shown a new room, and of course the studio owner is always very proud of his gear, you have to go through this:
“We have this and we have that.”
Then I say, “These monitors are all right, the mixer I can work with. But how many 1176s do you have? There are two? Do you have more?”
They say, “Well, we can get more.”
“Well two is not enough. I am going to need six, because they are workhorse compressors.”
When I run out of 1176s, I go to the LA-2A’s, LA-3A’s, or LA-4A’s. After that, it doesn’t matter so much because it is like, “Compress? Okay, fine.”
Not to betray any state secrets, but are there any particular settings you use for certain program material you’d be willing to share?
For vocals there really isn’t a better compressor. Sometimes an LA-2A is good because it grabs on a little bit more. Plus, on the LA-2A, you have the limiter position. That’s a trick that I use, which I don’t think anybody has really caught on to. I got awards and all that rubbish for drum sounds; it is insane but true. I concentrate on the drum kit because it is the only instrument in a rock ’n roll band that is actually acoustic. You know getting the proper “trenches?” Everything is bloody — the bass is electric, the Hammond is electric. The acoustic guitar and the vocals are the only other acoustic things.
When I am mixing, I melt the bass drum and I melt the snare. The bass drum will not be even. The first bass drum track doesn’t have an 1176 on, and it gets to breathe. Then, I put another bass drum next to it with an 1176 at 4:1 [ratio setting]. It evens it out a bit. I sneak that in and the bass drum is more constant.
Of course, you have to change your EQs appropriately. You might want to use the 1176 before or after the EQ. For the snare, I use one normal track that I EQ to death. Then I will use another one that has gone through a gate, hopefully a Keypex II. I put an 1176 on it to make it pop. I sneak that in. Not only to get rid of some of the dross because of the gate, the high hat, all the rubbish and symbols and shit. The 1176 will make it pop a little, and you sneak that in and all of a sudden the snare just comes up.
“You are working with talented people and it is your job to make them become what they hear in their heads…You had better get it, because if you don’t, you’re an asshole.”
For Rod Stewart’s “Do You Think I’m Sexy,” which we did in this very building, [Drummer] Carmine [Appice] had a bunch of kits. This was disco so he needed to be in mono. We used two or three mics and a small kit, and I compressed it so it could breathe. The bass drum pushed the cymbals away so of course I used an 1176. What else are you going to use? I used an 1176 and then I put an extra bass drum on another track so that I could control the volume of it-- but that was an 1176 thing. Now I know that a lot of people hate, loathe that song, but what did that record do? We did 12 million. That was the single that was an 1176.
Would you like the “Black Dog” guitar tone story?
Absolutely! Which Led Zeppelin album was that?
That is the fourth one, the really, really big one. “Stairway To Heaven,” “When The Levee Breaks,” and “Black Dog.” It sold about 18 million — something bloody ridiculous. Who would have known, you know? I had been trying to get this sound from Buffalo Springfield for a long time and I met Bill House. He said, “I just put two of them in series.” He didn’t really want to let me know what “they” were.
It was a direct sound and I thought that I knew what to do. There were three guitars on “Black Dog” so I triple tracked it. When I mixed it, these three guitars were down here and the rest of the tracks were up here. Since the