10/19/2021 0 Comments Hysteria Album Cover
Pyromania vs Hysteria - Which Def.Recording Engineer Nigel Green discusses the groundbreaking, innovative wizardry devised in the studio long before the existence of Pro Tools, and gives Def Leppard fans an inside look with never-before-seen photos from the Hysteria recordings.After a couple of strong albums, they were poised for crossover success by the time of 1983s Pyromania, and skillfully used the fledgling MTV network to their advantage. Def Leppard News - The Making Of Def Leppards Hysteria. Since 1992, the band has consisted of Joe Elliott (lead vocals), Rick Savage (bass, backing vocals), Rick Allen (drums, backing vocals), Phil Collen (guitars, backing vocals), and Vivian Campbell (guitars, backing vocals).More Def Leppard Hysteria Album Cover Meaning Image Gallery. Def Leppard are an English rock band formed in 1977 in Sheffield. Def Leppard Hysteria Album Cover Art.I think the reason was that in the 80’s it was all about making music production larger than life. Most of the time we recorded each instrument separately, a big departure from what was going on in the late 70’s where bands tended to record live together. Following the worldwide success of their 1981 album Dare, the band struggled to make a successful follow-up and the sessions for Hysteria were fraught with problems.Click here to read part of this interview and more from the band members on Billboard.comI think to summarize the recording of Hysteria I’d say we tried to do what people do now when they record in Pro Tools, but back in 1985 Pro Tools didn’t exist.In the UK, during the 80’s, record production was getting more and more sophisticated.
We would punch in and out of the multi- track tape recorder. This is something that naturally happens when any band plays together but when you record one instrument at a time the feel is very hard to replicate and it takes time. Recording instruments separately requires re-creating the original feel of the music. You had to blow people’s minds.But that creates its own set of problems. Of course with Hysteria we completely annihilated that barrier… it took three years!To be fair though, during the first year of recording the band used a different producer, Jim Steinman. We’d do this over and over until we got the feel just right.Of course this meant that instead of an album production taking a month or so, it could take anything up to a year. Sometimes we’d replace whole sections of songs, other times just bars or even a single beat. We’d be working on part of a song for hours at a stretch and suddenly he’d say, “Well, we’ve got all the notes… now we just need to get them in time and in the right order.” He’d have us rolling around laughing.Then just after Christmas, 1984, Rick Allen had a terrible car accident and lost his left arm. You had to have a sense of humor working the hours we did or you’d go crazy. We plodded on for quite a while but in the final analysis it was really Mutt they needed.I have to say Steve Clarke was a really funny guy to work with. I did my best re- recording guitars to beef up the sound and improve certain parts. But it soon became clear that a lot of the record still had to be recorded. That’s when Mutt decided to get involved, and Hysteria the album really got started. His eyes lit up all he ever wanted to do was play drums. The story I heard was Mutt went to Rick’s bedside and convinced the 21 year-old he still had a career playing with the group. We’d save that for the mixing.To explain why Hysteria was recorded the way it was you have to look back to Def Leppard’s previous album, Pyromania. From the get-go we all knew this was going to take a long time so we saw no reason to be locked into a really expensive studio for the lengthy recording process. It was a jingle studio with a pretty cheap Soundcraft board. But we didn’t have Pro Tools back then. With an analog multi track tape machine pretty much everything you’ve already recorded is set in stone.Nowadays, changing the arrangement of a song is a lot easier to do using Pro Tools. The reason is once you have the drum parts set in stone in a recording it’s very hard to change the arrangement later on. This led him to decide to leave the drum arrangements until last in the whole recording process. He wanted freedom in the studio to change parts of songs anytime he thought they could be improved upon musically, and that meant at anytime during the recording process. Mutt is all about the song first, then the performance, then the sound. But there was a real method to the madness. No one in the music business was recording the drums last. It was a Linn Drum (one of the first computer drums) playing straight time, no cymbals, no toms, just kick, snare and hat.At the time this was considered a very unorthodox way to record. The click track was there to help them record everything in time before they recorded the final drums. Stl to stp convertMutt came in and heard it and said, “Great, do it.” Without recording the album the way we had, we wouldn’t have been able to make changes like that.On Hysteria, the drums were always going to be recorded last. It was just Phil Nicholas and me messing around with samples on the Fairlight, for an extended version of the song. On Gods Of War, Phil Nicholas (Mutt’s Fairlight programmer) found all the Thatcher and Reagan sound bites to sample into the Fairlight so we could use them on the final mix.The intro to Pour Some Sugar On Me was changed even after the album was finished (and pressed!). Zelda mod in botwSo if they weren’t constantly checking the bass with a tuner it could drift out of tune. This would change the tension of the bass strings and therefore the tuning of the bass. What they didn’t realize is that the bass would slowly drift out of tune because the air conditioning kept coming on and off, changing the temperature of the room. This would often take all day. That’s fine if you record the bass in one take, but, as I said before, they were punching in bars and even beats to make sure they had the right feel. It’s a lot easier to hear guitars drift out of tune. It was a nightmare.So on Hysteria we decided to do all the guitars first before we put the bass down. The end result was the guitars had to be tuned slightly differently between choruses, verses, and bridges on different songs on Pyromania. Eventually I think the amp blew up.When Mutt finally arrived on the Hysteria album he didn’t want to go through that again so we decided to go for processed guitar sounds using something called a Rock Box. But they went through a ton of guitar amps (and a whole lot of time) before they found the right one. It was very hard to envision what the dynamics and the final sound was going to be like without bass and drums.On Pyromania the guitar sounds were recorded using a Marshall 100 watt amp. Sometimes I would blend a Roland studio flanger in to beef some of the power chord sounds. If the sound was not right after we added EQ or some outboard gear then we’d maybe change to a different guitar or add some kind of effects pedal. The difference was you could turn off the chorus and effects on the Rock Box allowing you to use your own effects.So the plan was we were pretty much going to use either the Rockman, or Rock Box for everything guitar wise. The Rock Box had similar settings to the Rockman: a clean sound and a distorted sound. So what to do?We decided to punch in each chord change separately. We liked the sound of the jangle but there was no way we could allow this scratching fret noise between chord changes to be part of the recorded sound. Sav was playing the part and the problem we were having was the Rock Box clean sound was so compressed you could hear every finger fret movement almost louder than the guitar sound itself. If the song and the arrangement is great, and the performance is great, then the sound quite often takes care of itself.We were recording the guitar verse jangle for the song, Hysteria. But this is where Mutt taught the band and me that music production is about the song and arrangement first, then performance, followed lastly by the sound. Hysteria Album Cover Plus Add EmbellishmentsSo we came up with the idea of recording all the parts we needed for the song on a single 8 bar section of music, say the verse. We had to double track each part plus add embellishments later on in the song. Recording like this and trying to get the feel right at the same time could literally take days. We’d record everything we needed… background vocals, the lot. And the same for the chorus.
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