EQ Magazine - May 2008 - (Page 22)

Big Twelve Inches corner, and Tom’s bass rig was in another corner. It was so loud that they would easily hear each other no matter where they stood. That was the point. We isolated amps and the drum kit a bit with blankets, but, of course, that only worked so well. Was everyone miked up the same way as on Toys? Yes—although we did try a pair of binaural mics on Joey. Those mics have their applications, but they weren’t an overwhelming success, in my opinion. We also miked this big cement room off the loading bay to get some ambience. It sounded huge. We got some great tracks up there, and we went back to the Record Plant for overdubs—mostly vocals, but some added percussion and guitar parts, as well—and mixing. Here’s a funny story—at that time, CBS had to have their union engineers on the session, so we always had these two guys hanging around the warehouse. Right at the end of one tune, we heard a door creak open. It was one of the guys coming back from coffee. In the mix, we had to make the creak louder, because we couldn’t get rid of it. You can hear it at the beginning of “Nobody’s Fault.” What console was in the mobile truck? It was a DeMideo board that was super straight-ahead and clean. It had minimal EQ, so it was just used to get the sound on tape. How did the limitations of the board affect your approach to recording the album? It was a matter of just finding the right mic, putting it in the right place, and getting it on tape as clean as possible. In that sense, it made the album easy to record. When you listen to Toys In The Attic and Rocks now, what are your thoughts on them? I didn’t realize at the time that these would be big releases, or that they would go down in history as classic rock records. Who knew that “Walk This Way” and “Sweet Emotion” would become the radio staples they did? But I do remember being excited about the sessions. These albums were fun to work on, and fun to mix, and it’s nice to be driving in the car, and still hear them playing on the radio. What comes across is the energy of the songs and the mixes—which is what we always wanted to put into the records in the first place. Listening back, it’s not about asking, “Is there enough 10kHz on this or that,” or focusing on specific technical points in the mix. It’s more about reflecting on the album in the context of “Does it feel good, and do you get excited when you hear it?” The answer, in these cases, is “yes.” I guess the magic was there when we put the records together, and that magic still comes across in the mixes 30 years down the road. The White Truck's 24-input/ 8-bus DiMideo console. HEWITT’S ROCKING MOBILE RIG David Hewitt—the Grammy-winning President/Chief Engineer of Remote Recording—was on the scene when Aerosmith recorded Rocks. Leaving the hustle and bustle of New York, the band and production team set up shop in an empty warehouse in Massachusetts, not far from Aerosmith’s hometown of Boston. To track the sessions, Hewitt rolled up an entire mobile studio, and here he tells us about some of the gear he brought in to keep the sessions running smoothly. What was the setup for Rocks? The band had a rehearsal room called the Where-house—a big, insulated industrial space with unusually high ceilings. We brought the Record Plant’s truck up there, which had a DeMideo console loaded with UREI 1108 modules. These were basically solid-state discrete versions of the old tube circuits UREI had made, so they sounded really good. How many inputs did the console have? It only had 24 inputs and eight mix busses, and tracking was a little difficult due to the limited inputs. To get around that, we also used some Ampex AM10 submixers, which were six by two. We brought the submixers in on line positions, because, even then, we started using up to 35 or 40 inputs for the band. Joey had tons of drums, Jay had room mics up, and Brad and Joe had a bunch of guitar amps all around. Every time they would add something, I’d be scrambling to find another preamp somewhere, and another way to get it in. What tape machines did you use? We were still doing 16 tracks at that point, and we had a pair of Ampex MM1000s—the first 16-track recorders ever produced. Those things were big and clunky, but they sounded great. Where did you put the truck? We actually pulled the truck right inside the Where-house from the loading dock. Everything stayed in the truck. We ran the cables out into the room, and set things up just like a live date. We had great big honking Westlake monitors that were just awful. They reached compression at like 9 o’clock, but the guys knew them well that we used them. The whole point was to make the band feel like they were just rehearsing—to catch them in their element—and that’s what we did. —Rich Tozzoli 22 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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