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Def leppard hysteria7/16/2023 ![]() 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.Īt 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. So on Pyromania they decided to leave the drums to the last and start recording bass and guitars to what was essentially a click track. (You’re going to be sick of me saying Pro Tools soon)☺️ Nowadays, changing the arrangement of a song is a lot easier to do using Pro Tools. With an analog multi track tape machine pretty much everything you’ve already recorded is set in stone. 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. Mutt and the band would write and record the music while in the studio. 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. We recommenced recording in a Dublin studio called Windmill Lane 2. From that point on it was two years in the making. 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. Then just after Christmas, 1984, Rick Allen had a terrible car accident and lost his left arm. 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. You had to have a sense of humor working the hours we did or you’d go crazy. I have to say Steve Clarke was a really funny guy to work with. We plodded on for quite a while but in the final analysis it was really Mutt they needed. 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. After 8 months they parted ways and I was brought in for what I thought would just be finishing off recording vocals and final mixing. To be fair though, during the first year of recording the band used a different producer, Jim Steinman. Of course with Hysteria we completely annihilated that barrier… it took three years! Of course this meant that instead of an album production taking a month or so, it could take anything up to a year. We’d do this over and over until we got the feel just right. Sometimes we’d replace whole sections of songs, other times just bars or even a single beat. (‘Punch’ was a term used in the old days meaning to replace parts of the recorded music in an ef ort to improve upon the original performance). 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.īut that creates its own set of problems. Like Spielberg with the movies, everything was edited to the nth degree. 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. In the UK, during the 80’s, record production was getting more and more sophisticated. ![]() I 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. 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.Ĭlick here to read part of this interview and more from the band members on
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