Seven Rush albums in fourteen years beside one Quebec lake. Two Metallica records made in two Danish winters. One Dio debut cut in a Van Nuys building that had started life as a Vox amplifier factory. Counted that way, heavy metal recording studios were never neutral boxes rented by the hour, and the rooms that mattered left their own acoustics on the tape, smearing a snare across stone in one building and stripping a guitar down to bare wood in the next, so that the records carried the building out into the world whether the producer had asked for it or not.
Nobody seasons a smokehouse on purpose. Forty years of oak fires go up into the rafters, the walls turn black and tacky with tar, and after that any side of fish hung from the rails overnight comes down tasting of every fire the building has ever held, the smoke of old sessions driven into the flesh of the new one, so that the curer's own recipe counts for less than the room it hangs in. The good studios worked on bands exactly like that.
The drummer who crossed the Atlantic in 1984 to record in a city he knew as a boy, in a room he knew only from the sound of one Rainbow album, was Metallica's Lars Ulrich. He wanted the room before he wanted the man who ran it. The tape machines, the producers and the gated drums belong to the chapter that covers it. The buildings have a separate story, and the records tell it.
What heavy metal recording studios put on the tape
A room does three things to a band before a single knob is turned. It decides how long a drum hit keeps ringing, it decides how much of the guitar cabinet bleeds into the drum microphones, and it decides how the players behave, whether they stay a month or leave at six, whether the bill makes them hurry. The first two are acoustics. The third is money, and it shaped the sound of the eighties as surely as the walls did.
Through the seventies a great many studios were built dead on purpose, carpeted, baffled and hung with drapes so that every instrument could be isolated and nothing leaked into anything else. For a soft rock ballad that was ideal. For a heavy band it was a disaster, because a kit recorded in a dead booth arrives on tape small and dry, and the engineer then has to buy the size back from a machine. The bands that could pay went looking for rooms that answered back.
Put a drum kit in a big hard room and each stroke goes off like the ball in a pinball table fired up the lane, cannoning off every post and rail and lighting a lamp at each strike before it drains, so that one hit on the snare reaches the microphones as a dozen arrivals from a dozen surfaces, each a fraction later than the last. Engineers call that ambience. A drummer calls it tonnage he did not have to play.
Copenhagen in winter
Recorded at Sweet Silence in Copenhagen with Roger Glover producing and Flemming Rasmussen engineering, and released on 3 February 1981, Difficult to Cure took Rainbow further toward the radio than Ritchie Blackmore's fans liked, and critics have called its production slick and polished ever since, the sound of a band chasing American arena rock rather than resisting it. That polish was the calling card. It travelled further than the album did.
"I Surrender", the Russ Ballard song that opens the record, went to number three on the UK singles chart with Joe Lynn Turner singing, and it is the plainest demonstration of the room: a pop chorus riding on a guitar that still sounds as if it is standing three feet from the listener, not somewhere behind a curtain of reverb. The polish is in the song. The grit is in the building.
The Danish engineer who had been co-owner of the room since 1980 was Flemming Rasmussen, and from 20 February to 14 March 1984 he recorded Ride the Lightning there, then took the band back for Master of Puppets from 1 September to 27 December 1985. Copenhagen in winter was cheap, dark and empty of distraction. A band with nowhere to go at night goes back into the live room, and the lineage of that decision runs straight through the heaviest American records of the decade.
A band with nowhere to go at night goes back into the live room.
A lake in the Laurentians
Built in 1972 in the hills near Morin-Heights, north of Montreal, with a control room whose windows looked out over Lac Perry, Le Studio was a residential room in the Rockfield manner, built of timber in place of stone. The Canadian trio that made it a second home from Permanent Waves in 1979 to Counterparts in 1993, seven albums in all, was Rush.
Moving Pictures, recorded there in October and November 1980, opens on "Tom Sawyer", and the promotional film for it was shot inside Le Studio itself, so the room is on camera as well as on the tape: Neil Peart's kit set up in the wooden live room, the lake behind the glass. The crowd chant that opens "Witch Hunt" on the same album was taped outdoors in the cold that December, the band and friends shouting into a pair of microphones with a bottle of Scotch passed between them. No studio in London could have sold that.
The attested proof that the room travelled beyond one band came in 1987. The Bellevue five who moved their concept record north from a Pennsylvania studio to finish it by the lake, with Peter Collins producing on the strength of his three albums with Rush, were Queensrÿche, and Operation: Mindcrime came out on 3 May 1988, the second half of a concept record finished in the same wooden room that had shaped Rush's own albums. The building went out of business in 2008, burned in a fire in 2017, and was demolished in 2020. The records are the only room left.
The big room in Van Nuys
Sound City sold the opposite of a lake view. It was a scruffy building in the San Fernando Valley with a large, awkward, hard live room and a Neve 8028 console installed in 1973, and what the room did to drums was the pinball effect at full size, every hit coming back huge and ragged. The singer who walked in with a new band early in 1983, Vinny Appice on drums and a twenty-year-old Vivian Campbell on guitar, was Ronnie James Dio.
Holy Diver, released in the United States on Warner Bros. in May 1983, has stood for four decades in critics' standard verdict as one of the best produced heavy metal records of its era, the room's size audible under Appice's drums while Campbell's guitar chews through the slow march of the title track. The rooms of the coasts were polishing records. This one left the splinters in.
Islands and the Gothenburg sound
The tax exiles took the idea abroad. Compass Point in Nassau, opened by Island Records' Chris Blackwell in 1977, sold isolation, sunlight and a favourable tax position, and AC/DC recorded Back in Black there in April and May 1980, two months after the death of Bon Scott, with Brian Johnson singing and Mutt Lange producing. Iron Maiden went back to the same island twice after Piece of Mind. A room with no winter was a redoubt against every distraction a band had brought from home.
One more room shaped a revival rather than a golden age. Studio Fredman in Gothenburg had given the city's melodic death metal bands their thick, bright guitar sound, and the Swedish producer who put a young traditional band through the same desk in November 1996 was Fredrik Nordström. HammerFall's Glory to the Brave, released by Nuclear Blast on 27 June 1997, played the riffs of 1983 through the guitar sound of 1997, and the faithful who had waited ten years for that record did not care which decade the tone came from.
Every one of those buildings was a gamble on a sound nobody could buy anywhere else. The same gamble, played for pennies instead of tax exile, is the NWOBHM on a shoestring budget, where the room was whatever a band could afford for two days and the tape was paid for in cash.
