New Monday #103
Happy Monday, y’all!
We were stuck an extra two days in LA due to snow on the East Coast, so we decided to visit some studios. The results of one of those visits will eventually become apparent (cue evil laugh... muah ha ha...). The other was to Clay Blair’s Hollywood gem Boulevard Recording. Wow! Wow wow wow! Have I got a story for you guys!
So, Boulevard is a smaller facility, with a lovely live room, a booth, a compact control room. It vibes like Sunset Sound: not fancy, but set up to work with great gear and engineering. Boulevard has a beautiful Sound Techniques ZR36 console. Hands down, this is the best-sounding mixing desk I’ve ever heard. Dan was equally blown away. It sounds amazing. Huge bottom. Beautifully clear. An amazing EQ. A killer bus compressor. I want one. Guess we’ll have to make one...
I found this excellent interview with Clay Blair. He discusses everything about Boulevard, from the room to the gear to the fire!
This location has a history. The space was founded in the 60s as Continental Recorders, then morphed into Producer's Workshop until 1985. Producer's Workshop punched WAY above its weight. The first two Ringo solo albums, Carly Simon, Billy Preston, Alice Cooper, Ray Charles. Steely Dan did much of the basic tracks for Aja at Producer's Workshop; Bob Ezrin finished off and mixed The Wall there.
The console was a custom Langevin. I couldn’t find pictures of it; it is currently being restored, though. Must have been a hell of a board. Fleetwood Mac’s engineer/producers Ken Caillat and Richard Dashut chose to mix Rumours on it at Producer's Workshop in 1976.
Rumours
Do we need to talk much about Rumours? It won a Grammy for album of the year, and is ranked #7 on lists of the greatest albums of all time. It’s in the Grammy Hall of Fame, selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress... it has more awards than Audie Murphy has medals. Love it, hate it, it’s Rumours, damnit!
The album was recorded through a haze of drugs, divorce and breakups, mainly at Record Plant Sausalito. The daily schedule looked something like this:
1pm: get up.
1:05pm: ingest huge amounts of cocaine.
3pm: fight with ex-girlfriend/boyfriend/husband/wife.
5pm: more cocaine!
6pm: dinner break.
10pm: recording or cocaine w/Star Trek reruns!
The bulk of the album was written in the studio, arranged mainly by Christine McVie and Lindsey Buckingham. The band would eventually get to work late at night, grouped close together in a 600 square foot room, jamming out arrangements, live mics everywhere. It is a testament to Ken Caillat’s skill that the record sounds as good as it does.
And it sounds great. The initial tracking is superb. You bring the faders up to unity and the sound pops out of the speakers, kicking you in the ears, and your heart races as you listen to the glorious bones of this album you’ve been hearing in some form or another your entire life.
Because Clay Blair has digital copies of the masters, and we heard them through his wonderful Sound Techniques ZR36 last week.
This is the coolest text message I’ve ever gotten:
SO... Fleetwood Mac's Dreams...
It’s a very simple recording, really. Five tracks of drums: kick, snare, hihat, and then toms and overheads on two tracks, with an additional two tracks of tom overdubs. Stereo congas. Two tracks of bass—an amp and a DI. A stereo recording of an electric guitar part with a volume pedal—the genius of Lindsey Buckingham. A single acoustic guitar track. A single Fender Rhodes track. A single Hammond Organ track. A vibraphone track. A single lead vocal. Four backing vocal tracks. Tracks 23 and 24 were blank.
Seriously, you bring the faders up and it sounds finished. Solo the kick—it’s huge (a single Beyer M88, which has the classic “boing" of an AKG D12 but a crisper overall sound). Solo the electric guitar—it’s rich and sinuous. Solo the bass tracks—the phase is correct, the sound has just enough fart to it. Solo the lead vocal... and there’s drum bleed all over it.
WHAT???!!!! Drum bleed on the lead vocal???
Yes! Tons of it! So much so that you think the drums are also on solo when you solo the vocal. HUGE amounts of bleed. How the hell did that happen??
Stevie Nicks wrote Dreams using a rhythm machine and an electric piano at Record Plant in Sly Stone’s sex/writing room (it had a piano, a bed, and black and red curtains). The group jammed it out in their little workspace, and Nicks nailed the vocal... while standing a few feet from a slightly baffled drum kit and Mick Fleetwood. The vocal had that “thing” about it. They tried a number of vocal takes but the rough guide vocal was it. They kept it and the drums and overdubbed the rest of it.
There’s an important lesson right there: bleed isn’t the issue you might think it is.
The drums... Ken Caillat has said the drums are an eight-bar loop. Had I known that going into Boulevard I would have listened for that, but who hangs out with a rare masterpiece and listens to the drums solo’d? This loop thing is a head scratcher, because there are all sorts of little nuances on the drums that lead me to think that it’s all one live take.
There were other issues with drums on the Rumours album. Playing analog tape over and over wears off the high end, and by the time Rumours was tracked and all the cocaine dusted off, Calliat and Dashut felt the overall quality had dipped, especially the drum recordings. They reconstituted some of it by syncing the masters to safety tapes using varispeed. They brought in a specialist who listened on headphones to a snare from one tape in the left and a snare from the other tape on the right, and then manually matched things up. No plug-ins in 1976!
I can’t hear a drum loop on mixes, and I didn’t notice anything “loopy” on the master, so they did an incredible job, evidently.
How to Arrange
Dreams is basically two chords—an F to a G—over and over again. The melody is in A minor. Not much to work with, but the song boasts a verse, a pre-chorus, a hooky chorus, and even a bridge/break. Ah, the genius of arrangement.
When Nicks played the song for the band, Christine McVie, a classically trained pianist, thought it was simple and dull. But Lindsey Buckingham, for whom the song was written, heard where it could go and took the song there, crafting out a clever arrangement that maintained the song’s minimalism while adding mood and nuance. This is a textbook example of how to produce a song.
Listen here. Headphones help but it is clear enough on laptop speakers.
Song kicks in: Drums, bass, a Fender Rhodes electric piano (off to the right), and a single electric guitar, swelled with a volume pedal and recorded to two tracks with delay and reverb. The guitar is left heavy, with a delay to the right as well as some panning.
The verse adds only that ephemeral lead vocal (with drum bleed all over it).
As the song moves into the pre-chorus, the arrangement builds by twos. This is a sort of standard guideline: If you add one instrument or new sound, it will sound like a part, but if you add or take away two or more parts or tracks, it’s much more noticeable, and the listener will hear it as a new section.
The pre-chorus adds three parts: toms on top of the snare on two and four (I think it’s two toms, one center, one more right), vibraphones with a bit of slapback to the right, and then what sounds like two Stevie Nicks harmony vocals to the left. The guitar line arpeggiates.
The tom overdub, along with the rising vibraphone line, lifts the energy until there’s a cymbal crash, like a clap of thunder, and we’re in the chorus.
The chorus follows the guideline of adding at least two parts. On the left is an acoustic guitar, kind of sounding like rain on leaves, and to balance it on the right, more backing vocals—this time Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie. The tom overdub and the vibraphone drop out, replaced by congas and a Hammond organ—it sounds like strings, but it isn’t.
Squint down on the right side backing vocals: Lindsey Buckingham is the dominant voice, but you can hear Christine McVie clearly at the ends of lines—listen for her on the line “you’ll know."
The break is upbeat, buoyed by a slight change in the bass line and a shift towards C major in the flavour of the melody. The rumour is bassist John McVie hated being told what to play (Lindsey Buckingham could be a bit of a dictator) but he agrees now that the parts he had to play were spot on. Overall, it thins out—drums, bass, electric guitar and Rhodes piano.
Then back to that trusty, boring, perfect bassline and the formula repeats: the slow build, the climax at the head of the chorus.
Of course, there are all sorts of little ear candy moments, ever inventive drum fills, different bass parts, and that swirly guitar. This is a track really worth listening to deeply. There is so much to steal here for your own productions. The truth is, you don’t need much.
That’s it for today.
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of being a guest on Bobby Owsinski’s Inner Circle Podcast. If you don’t know Bobby and his stuff, you’re missing out. His podcast is always interesting and his books are top notch.
Y’all have a great week. Get in the studio and make some lovely noise!
Warm regards,
Luke