Did you remix any of the songs from the first cars album? If so, how was it pulling up those tracks from back then? Any suprises? How were those Roy Thomas Baker BG vocals? Were they all comp'd to stereo pairs?

As well ad mixing the Heartbeat City record I did do remixes of Cars songs for a hits package and we had to get Roy's 40 track tape machine out to transfer some of the songs , cos it wasn't very stable at the time. So we transferred the stuff before the machine died.
All his stuff sounded great.I always loved Roy's way of working..he would duct tape all the meter's on the console and tape machine up so that you went by what the sound was like rather than being technically correct. Everything sounded great....
of course there is always a problem and at the time we were remixing early song's I was producing a song for them to also go on the hit's package. One day I come into the studio.assistant puts the tape up....a 1khz tone come screaming out of the speakers so I give the assistant a hard time for putting up the wrong reel....not funny first thing in the morning....only to find out that the maintenance guy had wiped the first 2 minutes of a song that had taken six weeks to record!!!!and used it to line the machine up with.
Umm.I was pissed...Roy was also there and had the guy up against the wall threatening to beat him up.....more fun....had no choice but to salvage what I could and re-record . Fun in the studio.
BTW,the maitenance guy been on.....acid..nice.

I love these stories!

Duct tape on the meters. Freaky as hell, but that's an idea I can work with. Thanks.

Doesn't get much better than this! Sorry to hear about your misfortune Mike, but it sure makes for a great story. Times like those definately seperate the men from the boys.

Reminds me of the infamous Steely Dan tail, when after sorting through numerous multitracks to find the favored take of a tune, it was discovered that an assistant wiped the first few minutes of the take with tone. Supposedly Becker and Fagan wanted to string him up right then and there, before he was escorted from the studio by the manager and subsequently never worked in the industry again.

Did I dream this, or is it true that Michael Jackson's "thriller" was actually mixed by the assistant ??? Who then became famous because of that... Who had cero'ed the console when he was not supposed to, or something ? and then he had to remix everything in one night.. . I think I heard this story before, but don't remember the details. Anyone ??

I doubt that is true. I've read articles with Bruce Swedien that said they had stacks of 1/4" mixes. I think they printed everything they thought might be useful.

I don't know if this was ever talked about in an article or something. I think it was kept a secret. But I really don't remember the details. If it was only a song, or the album. This story was told by a Teacher, at the recording school i went to.. I really don't know the details.. was wondering if anyone else heard about it

Duct tape on the meteres....would white duct work?
in a pinch, electrical tape?

great stories!

thanks for being here Mike.

ACID, the maitenance drug of choice!

test tones and lineups used to be something I dreaded as an assistant, an accident waiting to happen, and for good reason, I'm sure I did a couple of "intro tone edits".

nice stories mike, keep 'em coming please

Entropy tones were always a tough one for me too. I don't know how many times I would re check the tape to make sure it was "record pad" ...another good thing about not using analog I guess. I never wiped a master with tones ...but ...ummm...I did wipe 2 minutes of a drum track on a finished master with a little help of a faulty multi track remote. Funnily enough it was the same remote that also malfunctioned some time later on a mix session when the band had gone back to the U.S and the room was full of label heads and rather important people and as I hit "stop" on the remote , the tape transport jammed and the 2" tape came spewing out onto the floor , after jamming in the headblock , that piece of tape was now about 1'' thick insted of 2'' cos it had stretched real bad, the worst damage was in the first verse where nothing was repeated in the song so putting it back together was unbelievebly hard.
I hurried the "herd" out of the control room and was in a real sweat as I wondered what the hell to do. Any way I fixed it pretty well with a lot of time and it's messed up pretty bad on the vocal in the verse but I did the best I could!!
Ah the good old days of analog.!

I had a remote malfunction and show that the tracks were record safe when they weren't. Got a killer take, safe'd all the tracks, opened a new one for a guitar double, hit record and wiped the first verse of the whole band - none of the record lights were lit!

I flew a lot of parts around that day.

The original 827 software had a bug in it with the Lynx II syncronizers that when you did track arming on the Lynx and then unarmed them it looked like they were not in record. I came into do a session after a post session and loaded up my tape, went to record vocals and erased the first 4 tracks of drums for about 45 seconds. Couldn't figure out why I wasn't hearing or seeing all the drums come back from tape. Once I stopped and we investigated it, we found the bug. We ended up having to retrack the drums on that tune but thank god it was cut to a click and the drummer was one of the producers on the album and was able to recut in no time.... Everyone was pissed but given the situation ended up being very cool. It was a bad deal but I still feel like I dodged a bullet on that one. What if it had been John Robinson or Vinnie or a heavyweight like that.

Thank god for small blessings.............

Michael Greene

That's a situation where Studer would get my bill for extra studio time, the time wasted to begin with, pain & suffering and possible career/reputation damage.fuuck

I had a Scully 2" 16 track back in the late '70s that was real quirky if you where going from repro to sync on the 2nd 8 trks, I can't remember the exact hoops you had to jump throgh with the switches on the remote, but I once put a track in record for a gtr od on the 2nd eight and when I punched in everything got real quiet, turned and looked at the machine and saw all these little red lites on. Luckily it was in the vamp out, so about 2 mins with a razor blade and all was fine, nobody ever knew it except for me.

Great stories everyone. Please keep em coming!

It was around 1996.. I was using two Roland Dm800s cascaded together. A pair of JAz drives were the medium storage. I was going to back up on DAT the Dm800 data in the following morning. My backup JAz disks had not arrived in my ahnds yet. When I wake up on saturday and go to format the new jaz disks, make the backups, My mster JAz disks were ****ed up and now I had all the files/takes playing together randomly and they were 6 songs!!!
I almost got sick, lots 2 nites of sleep. My client got really pissed off at that time. However, we are great friends and the album got a major label contract!!
Today, I have 3 backups of everything!!!If it does not exist on at least two different physical places, digital data does not exist!LOL

That cannot be true. Period. You could never slip something like that past Bruce Sweiden. He has great ears. He says he didn't spend more than 4 hours on any mix on the record. Relax, it's not that amazing. He had mixed all that stuff dozens of times and most if it was pre mixed on tape in the form of stereo pairs. Stereo drums, bass, bg vocals...Bring them up to unity gain and it would sound great. The original elements were all on slave reels. If he didn't like something, he'd put the slave up and remix the element or the section and drop it back into the master. He was amazing and his team was too.

Steve

Always liked these productions. If I ever hear them on the radio these days, I turn it up.

Heard a cover they did of an old Iggy tune, and the vocal impression was hilariously dead on. It makes sense that he was an influence...all the 8th note "thub thubs" with the guitars, for instance.

Cheers (and thanks for all your input to this board; it's been quite enlightening).

"Tonight She Comes"?

War

Yep thats the one.