In the first weeks of 1980, inside a Georgian mansion at Tittenhurst Park near Ascot that Ringo Starr owned and had fitted out as Startling Studios, a producer put a microphone in front of a band and a crate of empty milk bottles. It was January and February 1980, and the milk bottles went onto "Breaking the Law" while a billiard cue swished through the air became a laser beam on "Metal Gods". The Birmingham five smashing that glass, and swishing snooker cues through the air for the next song, were Judas Priest. The man with the tape rolling was Tom Allom. The bottles ended up on "Breaking the Law". Nobody missed them.
Heavy metal production has always been a form of taxidermy. The producer's trade is to take something that only exists alive, five people and a wall of amplifiers shaking the plaster off a room, kill it cleanly, skin it onto two inches of magnetic tape, wire the jaw open and mount it on a shelf, so that forty years later it still looks ready to bite, which is more than many of the live animals ever managed. The good ones never showed the stitches.
Most of the music in the full story of the genre reached its listeners through a speaker rather than a stage, and the speaker only ever repeated what a few dozen rooms, a few hundred tape machines and a handful of men at the mixing desk had decided it should say. The rooms moved from London basements to Welsh farms, German villages and Caribbean islands. The machines went from four tracks to forty-eight and then to none at all.
Heavy metal production in the London rooms
The four musicians from Aston who walked into Regent Sound on Denmark Street in November 1969 and walked out, by the usual account, about a day later with a finished album on tape were Black Sabbath, and the machine that caught them, an eight-track, had so few tracks that overdubbing was barely an option. Rodger Bain produced. What went down was the band in one room, playing, with the bleed from the drums into the guitar microphones left exactly where it fell.
The young engineer who placed those microphones, and who did the same for Paranoid at Regent Sound and Island's Basing Street studio the following June, was Tom Allom, and he would spend the next ten years learning how hard a heavy band could be pushed into a recording before it stopped sounding like itself. That knowledge came back to the West Midlands in 1979. It came back as a producer's credit.
By 1973 the rooms had grown. Written in the stone chambers of Clearwell Castle in the Forest of Dean and recorded at Morgan Studios in Willesden that autumn, with a sixteen-track machine that allowed the band to stack parts rather than simply capture them, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath carries synthesiser, strings and Rick Wakeman's keyboards on "Sabbra Cadabra" over riffs that the 1969 sessions could never have held. Sixteen tracks are an invitation. The whole decade accepted it.
A farm in Wales and a truck in a Swiss corridor
The dairy farm outside Monmouth where the brothers Kingsley and Charles Ward began recording local bands in the late sixties, and then began letting them stay the night, was Rockfield, and the idea it sold, a studio you lived in, with cattle in the next field and nothing to do but work, changed how British rock records got made, and Rockfield stands, by its own long-standing claim, as the world's first residential recording studio. Judas Priest cut Sad Wings of Destiny there in the winter of 1975.
The same year Motörhead made its first recordings at Rockfield for United Artists, who sat on the tapes until 1979 and then released them as On Parole. Budgie worked there through most of the decade, and Rush crossed the Atlantic in 1977 to make A Farewell to Kings in the same buildings. A residential room sells time without a clock on the wall. For a heavy band that meant rehearsal and recording became the same thing.
The mobile studio built into a lorry for The Rolling Stones in 1968 turned that idea inside out, taking the room to the band instead of the band to the room. Parked outside the Grand Hotel in Montreux in December 1971, with cables run up through the building, it recorded Deep Purple making Machine Head in corridors baffled with wardrobes and mattresses, and the engineer threading those cables was Martin Birch. The drums came back full of short, hard reflections off plaster and stairwells. No studio designer would have signed off on them.
Birch took the same appetite for a live, uncorrected room to Musicland in Munich, a studio in the basement of the Arabella high-rise building founded by Giorgio Moroder, where Rainbow recorded Rising in February 1976. Cozy Powell's drum introduction to "Stargazer", recorded in that basement, is the sound of a big kit left to ring in a big space, and it remains one of the most learned drum solos in the genre, copied bar for bar by students for decades after.
Two inches of tape at thirty inches a second
From the middle of the seventies to the start of the nineties, almost every heavy metal album went onto the same kind of machine: a two-inch tape recorder carrying twenty-four tracks, a Studer, an MCI or an Otari, running at fifteen or thirty inches per second. The speed was a choice of sound. At thirty inches the tape gives a cleaner top end and less hiss. At fifteen the head bump, a rise in low-frequency response that machine alignment charts place around 50 to 100 Hz at that speed, fattens the kick drum and the bass guitar for nothing.
Tape also does something nobody has to ask it for. Driven hard, with the meters pinned past zero on a formulation like Ampex 456, the sales leader among studio tapes for two decades, magnetic tape takes the first few milliseconds of a snare hit the way a sandbag wall takes a burst of machine-gun fire. It swallows the sharp leading edge of every round and hands back a thick, dull thud. That thud is the drum sound of a generation of heavy records, and no engineer ever had to design it.
Magnetic tape takes the first few milliseconds of a snare hit the way a sandbag wall takes a burst of machine-gun fire.
The guitars were caught the same way in almost every room. A Shure SM57 jammed close to the grille of a four-by-twelve cabinet, pointed at the edge of the speaker's dust cap rather than its centre to keep the fizz down, often with a condenser such as a Neumann U87 a few feet back for air, into a console preamp, onto tape. Slide that 57 an inch toward the centre and the presence peak around 5 kHz starts to cut like a file. Angle it off axis and the top rolls away, leaving the low mids around 250 Hz to swell up and bury the bass.
A microphone does not hear a guitar. It hears two square inches of speaker cone, and everything you call the tone is a decision about which two inches.
Curtis Vance, KaosMetal
The amplifier behind the grille was more often than not a Marshall, and once the 2203 arrived with a master volume control in 1975, a guitarist could drive the preamp into distortion at a level the engineer could actually record without the room falling apart around the drum microphones. The tone was made in the amplifier. The tape finished it.
The men at the desk
The engineer who had learned his trade balancing Jon Lord's Hammond organ against Ritchie Blackmore's stack through Deep Purple's early seventies records, and who then produced Rainbow, Whitesnake, Black Sabbath's Heaven and Hell and Blue Öyster Cult's Fire of Unknown Origin before taking over the desk for Iron Maiden on Killers in 1981, was Martin Birch. No producer in the genre carried a longer pedigree into the eighties.
He stayed for ten consecutive Iron Maiden studio albums, through 1992, and then retired from production altogether. Steve Harris has called him hands-on, an engineer as much as a producer, someone who knew how to get a great sound and who let the band sound like itself rather than remaking it, with the bass carrying the relentless punch that became the band's signature.
Recorded at Compass Point Studios in Nassau between January and March 1983 and released that May, Piece of Mind opens with its new drummer, Nicko McBrain, playing alone, the fill that starts "Where Eagles Dare" landing dry, close and enormous with almost no reverb hung behind it. The island studios sold the same thing Rockfield had sold, isolation, only with better weather and a higher bill.
The engineer from the Aston sessions came back as a producer. Tom Allom took Judas Priest from the live Unleashed in the East in 1979 through to Ram It Down in 1988, and British Steel, released in April 1980 and carried to number four in Britain, cut the band's songs down to the length of a single, with K.K. Downing and Glenn Tipton double-tracked and panned hard to either side so the twin leads open outward like a pair of gates.
For Screaming for Vengeance in 1982 Allom took the band to Ibiza Sound Studios in Spain and finished the mixes at Bee Jay Studios in Orlando, Florida, and "You've Got Another Thing Comin'" pushed the album to number seventeen on the Billboard 200, still the band's best-selling record decades on. The tape went to the Mediterranean. The royalties came back from Ohio and Texas.
The session musician who built a studio in the village of Stommeln, just outside Cologne, at the start of the seventies, and who then produced every Scorpions album from In Trance in 1975 to Savage Amusement in 1988, was Dieter Dierks, who had built his first small studio under his parents' roof in Stommeln in 1969. His building became the bridgehead German heavy metal had lacked, a room of international standard run by one of its own. Accept recorded Balls to the Wall there in the summer of 1983 and then handed Dierks himself the desk for Metal Heart in 1985, released on Portrait in the United States, the record on which Wolf Hoffmann worked Beethoven's "Für Elise" into the title track's solo.
The producer from Northern Rhodesia who had already taken AC/DC from Highway to Hell in 1979 to Back in Black in 1980, and who then spent the better part of a year on a Sheffield band's third album, was Robert John Lange, Mutt to everyone who worked with him. Def Leppard's Pyromania, released in January 1983, reached number two in America behind Michael Jackson's Thriller.
It was built, not played. Lange had the band record to a drum machine's click, built the guitars and bass a part at a time and added the real drums last, stacked the harmony vocals from pass after pass until four voices carried the tonnage of a stadium crowd, and cut the two-inch tape with a razor blade wherever a performance needed tightening, splicing the best bar of one take onto the best bar of another. The method is attested by everyone who went through it. It took time and it took money, and Lange spent both.
| Year | Producer | Studio | Record |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1970 | Rodger Bain | Regent Sound, London | Black Sabbath, Black Sabbath |
| 1972 | Deep Purple (Martin Birch engineering) | Rolling Stones Mobile, Montreux | Deep Purple, Machine Head |
| 1976 | Jeffrey Calvert and Max West | Rockfield, Monmouth | Judas Priest, Sad Wings of Destiny |
| 1976 | Martin Birch | Musicland, Munich | Rainbow, Rising |
| 1980 | Tom Allom | Startling, Tittenhurst Park | Judas Priest, British Steel |
| 1983 | Robert John Lange | Battery, London, and Park Gates, Battle | Def Leppard, Pyromania |
| 1983 | Martin Birch | Compass Point, Nassau | Iron Maiden, Piece of Mind |
| 1985 | Dieter Dierks | Dierks Studios, Stommeln | Accept, Metal Heart |
| 1990 | Chris Tsangarides | Miraval, Correns | Judas Priest, Painkiller |
| 1992 | Martin Birch and Steve Harris | Barnyard, Essex | Iron Maiden, Fear of the Dark |
Gated reverb and the eighties drum
The sound that defined eighties drums was found by accident in the stone-walled live room at the Townhouse in west London around 1979 and 1980, when Hugh Padgham and Phil Collins, working on Peter Gabriel's third album, heard the drums through the heavily compressed reverse-talkback microphone and built a track, "Intruder", around what came out. The trick, once understood, is simple. Put the kit in a hard, bright room or a digital reverb, then set a noise gate to cut the reverb dead a fraction of a second after every hit.
The gate drops on the decay like a guillotine blade on a neck, and what is left is a snare as wide as a concert hall and as short as a slap in the face. The console that made it routine was the Solid State Logic 4000E, sold from 1979, the first large desk to combine a compressor and a gate on every channel with full parameter recall, so that an engineer could gate every drum on the kit without leaving his chair. Digital reverbs followed, the Lexicon 224 from 1978 and then the AMS RMX16 from 1981, the first full-bandwidth digital reverberator.
The gate drops on the decay like a guillotine blade on a neck, and what is left is a snare as wide as a concert hall and as short as a slap in the face.
By the middle of the decade the drum on the record was often not the drum the drummer hit. Triggers fixed to the shells let an engineer fire a sampled snare, recorded somewhere else on a better day, every time the real one was struck, and electronic kits from Simmons put pads under the sticks. On any honest reading the eighties metal drum is a hybrid, part wood, part tape, part memory chip.
Rick Allen, Def Leppard's drummer, lost his left arm in a car crash on 31 December 1984. He returned to the band on a customised electronic kit, with foot pedals triggering the sounds his left hand had once played, and Hysteria, produced by Lange and released on 3 August 1987, was recorded around it.
On the other side of the continent, Little Mountain Sound in Vancouver became the room for American hard rock in the late eighties under the producer Bruce Fairbairn and his engineer Bob Rock, and when Rock produced Mötley Crüe's Dr. Feelgood there in 1989, drummer Tommy Lee hit so hard that the drum itself would almost compress under the blow, and Rock triggered samples alongside the real kit to hold that weight together on tape. Everyone who heard it wanted the same kick drum.
From two-inch tape to a hard disk
The digital machines arrived before the music was ready for them. Sony's PCM-3324, a twenty-four track recorder writing digital audio onto half-inch tape, went on sale in 1982, the same year the compact disc went on sale in Japan. For most of the decade heavy bands kept tracking to analog and mixing to digital, taking the thud of the tape on the way in and the silence of the disc on the way out.
The real break came at the start of the nineties. Alesis's ADAT, unveiled in January 1991 and recording eight tracks onto an ordinary S-VHS videocassette, and Digidesign's Pro Tools, launched that June and putting a multitrack on a computer screen, arrived within months of each other. On a screen a drum take could be sliced into single hits and dragged onto the grid with a mouse. The razor blade went back in the drawer.
The old way ended quietly. Fear of the Dark, recorded at Steve Harris's own Barnyard Studios in Essex between 1991 and April 1992 and released that May, was Martin Birch's last album with Iron Maiden and his last as a producer, the end of a line that ran back through Compass Point, Munich and Montreux to a hotel corridor full of mattresses. After it the studio got cheaper, and the records got tighter and more alike.
Loudness, and the scrapyard crusher
The compact disc has a hard ceiling. Nothing on it can play louder than digital full scale, and in the nineties mastering engineers learned that a digital brickwall limiter could shave the peaks off every drum hit and haul everything else up to meet that ceiling, so that a new record sounded louder than the one before it in a shop's disc player. Waves released the L1 limiter in 1994, and it became the tool most blamed for spreading the practice.
Pushed far enough, the limiter works like the car crusher at a scrapyard. A song with a bonnet, doors and a roof goes in, and a cube of the same weight comes out, every snare flattened against every guitar, the cymbals mashed into a hiss, nothing sticking out and nothing left to open. Loud records became the rule. Quiet ones sounded broken beside them.
Measured the usual way, average loudness climbed by roughly ten decibels between the early eighties and its peak around 2008, and Metallica's own Death Magnetic that year became the record most often named for it, mixed so hot that fans campaigned for a quieter remaster. Streaming services now turn every track down to a common level before it plays, most of them to around minus fourteen decibels relative to full scale, which has taken most of the point out of the fight.
The machines changed every decade, and each change moved the sound. What they carried did not change: a riff, an interval, a tuning dropped a half step, and how heavy metal is built was settled long before anyone decided how it should be recorded. The tape only had to keep up.
