EQ Magazine - May 2008 - (Page 18)

Engineer Jay Messina on Recording the Aerosmith Masterworks Toys in the Attic and Rocks. The year was 1975, and a five-piece band from Boston known as Aerosmith had just wrapped up a lengthy tour to promote its sophomore release, Get Your Wings. Both that album and the band’s self-titled debut had charted gold, but the members were still hungry—ravenous, even—for breakout success. Little did they know that the next 24 months would propel them from an opening act to full-fledged arena-rock superstars, and forge a legacy that, three decades later, would remain strong as ever. But the band didn’t get there alone. When studio mastermind Jack Douglas and engineer Jay Messina stepped onboard for the Get Your Wings sessions in 1973–74, they established the beginnings of a production team that would help provide the so-called “Bad Boys from Boston” with the sounds, songs, and swagger to dominate the airwaves. Fully in charge for the next album—co-producer Ray Colcord and engineer Rod O’Brien helped with Wings—the duo channeled Aerosmith’s raw, reckless brilliance into the 1974 smash Toys in the Attic, and its 1976 platinum follow-up album, Rocks. These groundbreaking and influential records secured Aerosmith’s status as rulers of the mid-’70s hard-rock scene. Now, 30-plus years after Toys in the Attic and Rocks first hit the shelves, Messina broke out the albums, and sat down with EQ to reveal the studio techniques used to create two rockin’ masterpieces. What was your experience prior to working with Aerosmith? I started at Don Elliot Productions in 1966. Fun fact: Don had Les Paul’s oneinch 8-track machine, of which there were only five in the world at the time. My first session there was with Ravi Shankar. I recorded it with David Lucas, the engineer who was there at the time, and I was told a doctor would pay me at the end of the session. Ravi and his band wanted to play to this psychedelic film, so we set Big Twelve Inches up a 16mm projector in the control room— which made quite a racquet. At the end of the night, I went over to the doctor and got a check from him. The doctor was Timothy Leary. Around 1968, I moved to A&R studios. Phil Ramone ran it, and it was kind of like a school. I started mastering vinyl there on a mono Neumann lathe. It was a really good background for me to get into before getting further into recording, because I got to know what not to do in my mixes. For example, you didn’t want a lot of out-of-phase material, as it will lift the cover-cutter head right out of the grooves, and your record will skip. For the same reason, you had to be careful about the low end. Also, a by Rich Tozzoli 18 EQ MAY 2008 www.eqmag.com http://www.eqmag.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of EQ Magazine - May 2008

EQ Magazine - May 2008 Contents Talk Box Sounding Board Jamie Lidell, What the New Model of Record Deal Means to You, Part II, Andrew W.K. Tool Box Aerosmith Fast Tracks Guitar Trax Bass Management Key Issues Drum Heads Vocal Cords Mix Bus Cheat Sheet DigiDesign Pro Tools LE 7.4 Cakewalk Sonar 7 Line 6 UX8 Studio Projects CS5 Art Tubefire 8 Jazzmutant Dexter MCDSP Emerald Pack Overloud Breverb KRK Exposé E8B Mackie MR5 Blue Sky Exo Monitor System Big Fish Audio Around the World in 80 Raves East West Fab Four Virtual Instrument Sony Matt Fink- Starvu Session Keys Room With A VU

EQ Magazine - May 2008

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