The Links Lounge (*** NO POLITICS/RELIGION/LIV ***)

[Petethreeput]

Are we seriously in #14?

 

Way too long.  Watching golf is slower than watching the NFL.

[aenemated]

This was a particularly good batch ... mainly because I found you can get House Autry hushpuppy mix on Amazon! 

 

 

Stu knows House Autry! 

[TiScape]

5 minutes ago, aenemated said:

Mine tends to hang out for 12ish hours but depends on the size and when the stall happens. A particularly big one was on for almost 20 last summer. 

 

 

Whole hog - which you get at piedmont NC spots - is far, far better than just a shoulder but I take what I can get out here. 

 

I'll brine it in a mix of half salt water, half apple cider overnight the day before. Other than that, just a pretty standard approach. My sauce is an adjustment from the great Dennis Rogers of Raleigh's News & Observer fame.

This is the one that took 16hrs. 8.5lbs 

[TiScape]

1 minute ago, Petethreeput said:

Are we seriously in #14?

 

Way too long.  Watching golf is slower than watching the NFL.

Weather delay

[Triple Lindy]

10 minutes ago, chisag said:

I am good making ribs on my Weber but pulled pork remains a mystery.

If you’re talking about a Weber Kettle, give this a try. When we had a 2nd home down near Austin, all I had was a Kettle there. Cooked some great brisket, ribs and pork butt using the Kettle/SnS combo.

https://snsgrills.com/products/slow-n-sear-deluxe

 

The Kettle is one versatile grill! I use this to turn it into a pizza oven:

 

 

[Double Mocha Man]

19 minutes ago, Petethreeput said:

If it takes more than 20 minutes for food… I am out.

 

That's my rule for cooking dinner!  If it takes longer to cook than it does to eat, it's out.  Hence, so many pastas and BBQ's for me.  The BBQ, of course, takes longer than 20 minutes but you barely have to tend it.  Instead I can dick around on GolfWRX and sip the pre-dinner glass of wine.

[chisag]

20 hours ago, touch said:

Since music was big part of the discussion today in the Lounge I will share some gems from the 80's.

 

The DJ bows out and heads to the kitchen for an organic smoothie. 😄

 

I am one of only a few in this group that thought the decade brought us a ton of great music. 🕺

 

 

... We all like what we like as it should be, but just sayin this is a pretty good take on 80's production:


There’s no mistaking the super-sized sheen of an 80s rock album – but what’s the story behind that sound, and does it deserve such criticism?
 

The popular perception of an 80s rock record goes something like this. A gated snare drum going off like a gunshot. Synths, samples and digital drums jostling for elbow room in an airtight multitracked mix. A production job as shiny as the compact disc sliding into a yuppie’s Bang & Olufsen. And, most of all, a sense of unsustainable size, like bubblegum blown up too far.

It’s a glib stereotype, of course – but only just. “Everything was pushed to the limit in the eighties,” Europe frontman Joey Tempest remembers. “It was a decade of flamboyance and pushing all the faders, a hundred per cent.”
 

Rewind just a little further, to the 70s, and rock’n’roll wasn’t rocket science. Back then a studio was a bare-bones, all-analogue world with a human heartbeat, where records lived or died on the skill of the musicians on the floor. “If you had a drummer that could keep time, life was good,” recalls veteran producer Keith Olsen, famed for his work with Fleetwood Mac, Ozzy Osbourne and Whitesnake. “If you had a great guitar player, it was wonderful. If the songs were there, it was even better. Y’know, it was songs, performance and sound, in that order.”

“In the seventies, you had a tape recorder,” picks up Chris Tsangarides, who has worked as producer for heavyweights including Thin Lizzy and Judas Priest. “You had a microphone, a guitar with an amplifier, and a drum set. Maybe a few compressors, some reverberation plates, a bit of delay. Back then it centred on how good the band was. Then we hit the eighties and there was all this technology thrown at us. It went from tape to digital in about three seconds, and it was a bit of the emperor’s new clothes. In the eighties it was all about the production.”
 

Previously, an adventurous rock band would rely on Heath Robinson-style ingenuity, from John Bonham recording his levee-breaking beats in a stairwell, to Queen recreating a tap-dancer using thimbles on Seaside Rendezvous. As hardware arrived from the tech giants of Japan and America, trailblazing sounds were just a keypad away. “The biggest technological development,” Olsen says, “was multitrack recording.”
 

“Those eighties records were so heavily overdubbed – because you could,” Tsangarides explains. “Until about 1974 it was sixteen-track. After that it was twenty-four-track. Then in the eighties it started to be two twenty-four-tracks together with a synchroniser. And they did Sgt. Pepper’s on four tracks, so that puts it into perspective. Us producers were coming out with all this: ‘Oh, I used twenty million tracks to do that song.’ ‘Well I used even more.’ ‘Have you heard Mutt Lange was using five billion tracks?’ It was like Chinese whispers. But really it was all to do with trying to get this ultimate, big, huge sound.”
 

Leppard, at least, were still in thrall to the electric guitar, an instrument that had been the uncontested tool of rock since the 50s. Elsewhere, Joey Tempest recalls, when the synth landed it not only dictated the sound of the era, but also directed the creative process. “All these new toys came into play. Europe used to be a guitar-based band, but all of a sudden, in the guitar shop, there was another room full of synths. So it was like, ‘Whoa, what’s this?’ The Final Countdown had more keyboards because that’s what I was writing on. But some bands really did put on a lot of keyboards, and then the guitars sort of disappeared in the mix. I remember John Norum [Europe’s lead guitarist] was frustrated with how the guitars were pushed back.”
 

It was a familiar headache for Tsangarides, too: “You’d have these huge banks of keyboards hooked up together by MIDI – one playing strings, one playing organ, whatever you wanted – and get this absolutely massive sound. But when you put it into the track, you couldn’t hear the guitar. It just didn’t marry at all. I’d think: ‘How come I can put on a Deep Purple or Uriah Heep album from back in the day and I can hear everything? What’s going on?’ Then it dawned on me that, y’know, that was all analogue equipment.”

 

Ironically, the ubiquitous gated drum sound began as a quest to emulate those 70s productions. “People were after the Bonham sound,” explains Tsangarides. “But this wasn’t it. The gated drum sound is a short reverb that has a noise gate on it, so it cuts it off. It’s just like – bam! This is the sound Phil Collins used on his toms for In The Air Tonight. I used to hear it all the bloody time. You had this fricking loud snare drum, and then some poor sod trying to get his guitar heard above it.”

 

Even further removed from Bonham’s monster Ludwig kit were the thin hexagonal pads of Dave Simmons’ nascent electronic drums, launched in 1980. “On their own they sounded like arse,” says Tsangarides. “But on Thin Lizzy’s Thunder And Lightning I triggered a set of Simmons toms from Brian Downey’s drum kit and mixed them in with the real drums. That’s why that album sounds like it does, in a way.” Even when it came to the latter stages of a record, the producer adds, there were expectations. “You couldn’t mix a record unless you had five hundred bits of outboard gear. There was this thing called the Aphex Aural Exciter. You couldn’t buy it. You couldn’t rent it. What would happen was, you used this machine on your final mix and they’d charge you something like seventy-five pounds for every minute of song. And all it did was make everything sound really toppy. Pointless. But it was like, ‘You’ve got to have one of these… because they’ve got one!’”

 

As well as one-upmanship, producers were also motivated by the prevailing media. “Radio in America was so important for all these producers,” Tempest points out. “And the ones that had a brain understood the expansion and the limited EQ that radio actually added, and they didn’t push things too much.” “The CD format was a factor, too,” says Tsangarides. “Because here’s the thing: when you mixed for a record, there were certain criteria. You couldn’t make the vocals too bright. Too much bass, the needle jumps out of the groove. When CDs came along, good, bad or indifferent, however much bass or treble you had – even if it sounded total arse – it would still reproduce. So that stuff did have an effect on things.”

 

As did the financial health of the 80s record industry. “I was lucky enough to be looked after by Zomba Management,” says Tsangarides, “who also had Martin Birch, Mutt Lange, Tony Platt. Battery Studios was our home from home in London. And it was like: ‘What do you need?’ Any piece of equipment, any mic, you could have it. They put this ethos in you that it has to be the best. They’d never look down their noses, like: ‘It’s taken you six months to make the record.’ Good grief, no. It was all: ‘Oh, we’ll go to Barbados to record the bass drum.’ It got silly. I think we did disappear up our own jacksies.”

 

It’s important to differentiate, says Tempest, between the 80s producers who struck a balance and those who created monsters. “You had the guys who understood how to do it, like Mutt Lange, Martin Birch, Bob Rock, Bruce Fairbairn, Ted Templeman – usually the ones who started in the seventies. But they were the good guys. Then there was the younger breed coming in who would push it even more. Towards the end of the eighties it was the kitchen sink, basically. People thought it sounded bigger, but it didn’t. When everything was done, you’d compare it to a straightforward rock album and you realised, ‘Hang on, it got smaller.’”

 

“People would put on eighteen tracks of guitar doing the same thing,” Tsangarides says with a sigh, “because ‘It’ll sound mega, man’. Well, it didn’t. Because you’ve still only got the same frequency spectrum. So the more you put on, the smaller it sounds.”

The sonic inflation couldn’t go on forever, of course. Just as the hair-metal bands of the 80s were rendered archaic by the route-one songcraft of grunge, so the era’s production values were cruelly exposed by a wave of lean incoming albums. “The nineties was a real breath of fresh air, to be honest,” says Tsangarides. “Whether you liked the music or not, things went more back to basics. Y’know, band in a studio, with a producer, ‘one-two-three-four’, off they go.”

 

“It went back to the roots,” says Tempest. “Soundgarden did some great productions. Butch Vig did a great job on Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

 

Three decades later, quantifying the merits of the 80s sound is a slippery task. The lazy, broad-brush consensus is that this was an era whose plump, pompous sonics should serve as a cautionary tale. Closer to the truth, Tempest offers, is that 80s albums must be judged on a case-by-case basis. “Some of those productions are hard to listen to today. But that’s not to say it was all worse. If you listen to Whitesnake’s 1987, it’s pushed to the limit. But it’s still one of my favourites. Appetite For Destruction was pushed a bit, but it was an actual sound. Martin Birch’s productions for Iron Maiden were great. Aerosmith and Bruce Fairbairn with Pump, that still sounded like a real band. Europe? I think we were on the right side. We didn’t push things too much. But a lot of productions did.”

 

 

[Double Mocha Man]

3 minutes ago, chisag said:

 

 

... We all like what we like as it should be, but just sayin this is a pretty good take on 80's production:


There’s no mistaking the super-sized sheen of an 80s rock album – but what’s the story behind that sound, and does it deserve such criticism?
 

The popular perception of an 80s rock record goes something like this. A gated snare drum going off like a gunshot. Synths, samples and digital drums jostling for elbow room in an airtight multitracked mix. A production job as shiny as the compact disc sliding into a yuppie’s Bang & Olufsen. And, most of all, a sense of unsustainable size, like bubblegum blown up too far.

It’s a glib stereotype, of course – but only just. “Everything was pushed to the limit in the eighties,” Europe frontman Joey Tempest remembers. “It was a decade of flamboyance and pushing all the faders, a hundred per cent.”
 

Rewind just a little further, to the 70s, and rock’n’roll wasn’t rocket science. Back then a studio was a bare-bones, all-analogue world with a human heartbeat, where records lived or died on the skill of the musicians on the floor. “If you had a drummer that could keep time, life was good,” recalls veteran producer Keith Olsen, famed for his work with Fleetwood Mac, Ozzy Osbourne and Whitesnake. “If you had a great guitar player, it was wonderful. If the songs were there, it was even better. Y’know, it was songs, performance and sound, in that order.”

“In the seventies, you had a tape recorder,” picks up Chris Tsangarides, who has worked as producer for heavyweights including Thin Lizzy and Judas Priest. “You had a microphone, a guitar with an amplifier, and a drum set. Maybe a few compressors, some reverberation plates, a bit of delay. Back then it centred on how good the band was. Then we hit the eighties and there was all this technology thrown at us. It went from tape to digital in about three seconds, and it was a bit of the emperor’s new clothes. In the eighties it was all about the production.”
 

Previously, an adventurous rock band would rely on Heath Robinson-style ingenuity, from John Bonham recording his levee-breaking beats in a stairwell, to Queen recreating a tap-dancer using thimbles on Seaside Rendezvous. As hardware arrived from the tech giants of Japan and America, trailblazing sounds were just a keypad away. “The biggest technological development,” Olsen says, “was multitrack recording.”
 

“Those eighties records were so heavily overdubbed – because you could,” Tsangarides explains. “Until about 1974 it was sixteen-track. After that it was twenty-four-track. Then in the eighties it started to be two twenty-four-tracks together with a synchroniser. And they did Sgt. Pepper’s on four tracks, so that puts it into perspective. Us producers were coming out with all this: ‘Oh, I used twenty million tracks to do that song.’ ‘Well I used even more.’ ‘Have you heard Mutt Lange was using five billion tracks?’ It was like Chinese whispers. But really it was all to do with trying to get this ultimate, big, huge sound.”
 

Leppard, at least, were still in thrall to the electric guitar, an instrument that had been the uncontested tool of rock since the 50s. Elsewhere, Joey Tempest recalls, when the synth landed it not only dictated the sound of the era, but also directed the creative process. “All these new toys came into play. Europe used to be a guitar-based band, but all of a sudden, in the guitar shop, there was another room full of synths. So it was like, ‘Whoa, what’s this?’ The Final Countdown had more keyboards because that’s what I was writing on. But some bands really did put on a lot of keyboards, and then the guitars sort of disappeared in the mix. I remember John Norum [Europe’s lead guitarist] was frustrated with how the guitars were pushed back.”
 

It was a familiar headache for Tsangarides, too: “You’d have these huge banks of keyboards hooked up together by MIDI – one playing strings, one playing organ, whatever you wanted – and get this absolutely massive sound. But when you put it into the track, you couldn’t hear the guitar. It just didn’t marry at all. I’d think: ‘How come I can put on a Deep Purple or Uriah Heep album from back in the day and I can hear everything? What’s going on?’ Then it dawned on me that, y’know, that was all analogue equipment.”

 

Ironically, the ubiquitous gated drum sound began as a quest to emulate those 70s productions. “People were after the Bonham sound,” explains Tsangarides. “But this wasn’t it. The gated drum sound is a short reverb that has a noise gate on it, so it cuts it off. It’s just like – bam! This is the sound Phil Collins used on his toms for In The Air Tonight. I used to hear it all the bloody time. You had this fricking loud snare drum, and then some poor sod trying to get his guitar heard above it.”

 

Even further removed from Bonham’s monster Ludwig kit were the thin hexagonal pads of Dave Simmons’ nascent electronic drums, launched in 1980. “On their own they sounded like arse,” says Tsangarides. “But on Thin Lizzy’s Thunder And Lightning I triggered a set of Simmons toms from Brian Downey’s drum kit and mixed them in with the real drums. That’s why that album sounds like it does, in a way.” Even when it came to the latter stages of a record, the producer adds, there were expectations. “You couldn’t mix a record unless you had five hundred bits of outboard gear. There was this thing called the Aphex Aural Exciter. You couldn’t buy it. You couldn’t rent it. What would happen was, you used this machine on your final mix and they’d charge you something like seventy-five pounds for every minute of song. And all it did was make everything sound really toppy. Pointless. But it was like, ‘You’ve got to have one of these… because they’ve got one!’”

 

As well as one-upmanship, producers were also motivated by the prevailing media. “Radio in America was so important for all these producers,” Tempest points out. “And the ones that had a brain understood the expansion and the limited EQ that radio actually added, and they didn’t push things too much.” “The CD format was a factor, too,” says Tsangarides. “Because here’s the thing: when you mixed for a record, there were certain criteria. You couldn’t make the vocals too bright. Too much bass, the needle jumps out of the groove. When CDs came along, good, bad or indifferent, however much bass or treble you had – even if it sounded total arse – it would still reproduce. So that stuff did have an effect on things.”

 

As did the financial health of the 80s record industry. “I was lucky enough to be looked after by Zomba Management,” says Tsangarides, “who also had Martin Birch, Mutt Lange, Tony Platt. Battery Studios was our home from home in London. And it was like: ‘What do you need?’ Any piece of equipment, any mic, you could have it. They put this ethos in you that it has to be the best. They’d never look down their noses, like: ‘It’s taken you six months to make the record.’ Good grief, no. It was all: ‘Oh, we’ll go to Barbados to record the bass drum.’ It got silly. I think we did disappear up our own jacksies.”

 

It’s important to differentiate, says Tempest, between the 80s producers who struck a balance and those who created monsters. “You had the guys who understood how to do it, like Mutt Lange, Martin Birch, Bob Rock, Bruce Fairbairn, Ted Templeman – usually the ones who started in the seventies. But they were the good guys. Then there was the younger breed coming in who would push it even more. Towards the end of the eighties it was the kitchen sink, basically. People thought it sounded bigger, but it didn’t. When everything was done, you’d compare it to a straightforward rock album and you realised, ‘Hang on, it got smaller.’”

 

“People would put on eighteen tracks of guitar doing the same thing,” Tsangarides says with a sigh, “because ‘It’ll sound mega, man’. Well, it didn’t. Because you’ve still only got the same frequency spectrum. So the more you put on, the smaller it sounds.”

The sonic inflation couldn’t go on forever, of course. Just as the hair-metal bands of the 80s were rendered archaic by the route-one songcraft of grunge, so the era’s production values were cruelly exposed by a wave of lean incoming albums. “The nineties was a real breath of fresh air, to be honest,” says Tsangarides. “Whether you liked the music or not, things went more back to basics. Y’know, band in a studio, with a producer, ‘one-two-three-four’, off they go.”

 

“It went back to the roots,” says Tempest. “Soundgarden did some great productions. Butch Vig did a great job on Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

 

Three decades later, quantifying the merits of the 80s sound is a slippery task. The lazy, broad-brush consensus is that this was an era whose plump, pompous sonics should serve as a cautionary tale. Closer to the truth, Tempest offers, is that 80s albums must be judged on a case-by-case basis. “Some of those productions are hard to listen to today. But that’s not to say it was all worse. If you listen to Whitesnake’s 1987, it’s pushed to the limit. But it’s still one of my favourites. Appetite For Destruction was pushed a bit, but it was an actual sound. Martin Birch’s productions for Iron Maiden were great. Aerosmith and Bruce Fairbairn with Pump, that still sounded like a real band. Europe? I think we were on the right side. We didn’t push things too much. But a lot of productions did.”

 

 

 

Good novel chisag.  You're not playing golf today, are you?  If I typed that much my fingers would be so sore I couldn't go to the course the next day.  😁

[TiScape]

1 hour ago, touch said:

 

 

Just keep this in your bag and every three holes jump behind a tree, open up your pants and sprinkle away. 

 

 

Ok t, I stole this and posted it in the tour sub! I couldn’t resist! 😊 🙏🏼 

[Petethreeput]

15 minutes ago, chisag said:

 

 

... We all like what we like as it should be, but just sayin this is a pretty good take on 80's production:


There’s no mistaking the super-sized sheen of an 80s rock album – but what’s the story behind that sound, and does it deserve such criticism?
 

The popular perception of an 80s rock record goes something like this. A gated snare drum going off like a gunshot. Synths, samples and digital drums jostling for elbow room in an airtight multitracked mix. A production job as shiny as the compact disc sliding into a yuppie’s Bang & Olufsen. And, most of all, a sense of unsustainable size, like bubblegum blown up too far.

It’s a glib stereotype, of course – but only just. “Everything was pushed to the limit in the eighties,” Europe frontman Joey Tempest remembers. “It was a decade of flamboyance and pushing all the faders, a hundred per cent.”
 

Rewind just a little further, to the 70s, and rock’n’roll wasn’t rocket science. Back then a studio was a bare-bones, all-analogue world with a human heartbeat, where records lived or died on the skill of the musicians on the floor. “If you had a drummer that could keep time, life was good,” recalls veteran producer Keith Olsen, famed for his work with Fleetwood Mac, Ozzy Osbourne and Whitesnake. “If you had a great guitar player, it was wonderful. If the songs were there, it was even better. Y’know, it was songs, performance and sound, in that order.”

“In the seventies, you had a tape recorder,” picks up Chris Tsangarides, who has worked as producer for heavyweights including Thin Lizzy and Judas Priest. “You had a microphone, a guitar with an amplifier, and a drum set. Maybe a few compressors, some reverberation plates, a bit of delay. Back then it centred on how good the band was. Then we hit the eighties and there was all this technology thrown at us. It went from tape to digital in about three seconds, and it was a bit of the emperor’s new clothes. In the eighties it was all about the production.”
 

Previously, an adventurous rock band would rely on Heath Robinson-style ingenuity, from John Bonham recording his levee-breaking beats in a stairwell, to Queen recreating a tap-dancer using thimbles on Seaside Rendezvous. As hardware arrived from the tech giants of Japan and America, trailblazing sounds were just a keypad away. “The biggest technological development,” Olsen says, “was multitrack recording.”
 

“Those eighties records were so heavily overdubbed – because you could,” Tsangarides explains. “Until about 1974 it was sixteen-track. After that it was twenty-four-track. Then in the eighties it started to be two twenty-four-tracks together with a synchroniser. And they did Sgt. Pepper’s on four tracks, so that puts it into perspective. Us producers were coming out with all this: ‘Oh, I used twenty million tracks to do that song.’ ‘Well I used even more.’ ‘Have you heard Mutt Lange was using five billion tracks?’ It was like Chinese whispers. But really it was all to do with trying to get this ultimate, big, huge sound.”
 

Leppard, at least, were still in thrall to the electric guitar, an instrument that had been the uncontested tool of rock since the 50s. Elsewhere, Joey Tempest recalls, when the synth landed it not only dictated the sound of the era, but also directed the creative process. “All these new toys came into play. Europe used to be a guitar-based band, but all of a sudden, in the guitar shop, there was another room full of synths. So it was like, ‘Whoa, what’s this?’ The Final Countdown had more keyboards because that’s what I was writing on. But some bands really did put on a lot of keyboards, and then the guitars sort of disappeared in the mix. I remember John Norum [Europe’s lead guitarist] was frustrated with how the guitars were pushed back.”
 

It was a familiar headache for Tsangarides, too: “You’d have these huge banks of keyboards hooked up together by MIDI – one playing strings, one playing organ, whatever you wanted – and get this absolutely massive sound. But when you put it into the track, you couldn’t hear the guitar. It just didn’t marry at all. I’d think: ‘How come I can put on a Deep Purple or Uriah Heep album from back in the day and I can hear everything? What’s going on?’ Then it dawned on me that, y’know, that was all analogue equipment.”

 

Ironically, the ubiquitous gated drum sound began as a quest to emulate those 70s productions. “People were after the Bonham sound,” explains Tsangarides. “But this wasn’t it. The gated drum sound is a short reverb that has a noise gate on it, so it cuts it off. It’s just like – bam! This is the sound Phil Collins used on his toms for In The Air Tonight. I used to hear it all the bloody time. You had this fricking loud snare drum, and then some poor sod trying to get his guitar heard above it.”

 

Even further removed from Bonham’s monster Ludwig kit were the thin hexagonal pads of Dave Simmons’ nascent electronic drums, launched in 1980. “On their own they sounded like arse,” says Tsangarides. “But on Thin Lizzy’s Thunder And Lightning I triggered a set of Simmons toms from Brian Downey’s drum kit and mixed them in with the real drums. That’s why that album sounds like it does, in a way.” Even when it came to the latter stages of a record, the producer adds, there were expectations. “You couldn’t mix a record unless you had five hundred bits of outboard gear. There was this thing called the Aphex Aural Exciter. You couldn’t buy it. You couldn’t rent it. What would happen was, you used this machine on your final mix and they’d charge you something like seventy-five pounds for every minute of song. And all it did was make everything sound really toppy. Pointless. But it was like, ‘You’ve got to have one of these… because they’ve got one!’”

 

As well as one-upmanship, producers were also motivated by the prevailing media. “Radio in America was so important for all these producers,” Tempest points out. “And the ones that had a brain understood the expansion and the limited EQ that radio actually added, and they didn’t push things too much.” “The CD format was a factor, too,” says Tsangarides. “Because here’s the thing: when you mixed for a record, there were certain criteria. You couldn’t make the vocals too bright. Too much bass, the needle jumps out of the groove. When CDs came along, good, bad or indifferent, however much bass or treble you had – even if it sounded total arse – it would still reproduce. So that stuff did have an effect on things.”

 

As did the financial health of the 80s record industry. “I was lucky enough to be looked after by Zomba Management,” says Tsangarides, “who also had Martin Birch, Mutt Lange, Tony Platt. Battery Studios was our home from home in London. And it was like: ‘What do you need?’ Any piece of equipment, any mic, you could have it. They put this ethos in you that it has to be the best. They’d never look down their noses, like: ‘It’s taken you six months to make the record.’ Good grief, no. It was all: ‘Oh, we’ll go to Barbados to record the bass drum.’ It got silly. I think we did disappear up our own jacksies.”

 

It’s important to differentiate, says Tempest, between the 80s producers who struck a balance and those who created monsters. “You had the guys who understood how to do it, like Mutt Lange, Martin Birch, Bob Rock, Bruce Fairbairn, Ted Templeman – usually the ones who started in the seventies. But they were the good guys. Then there was the younger breed coming in who would push it even more. Towards the end of the eighties it was the kitchen sink, basically. People thought it sounded bigger, but it didn’t. When everything was done, you’d compare it to a straightforward rock album and you realised, ‘Hang on, it got smaller.’”

 

“People would put on eighteen tracks of guitar doing the same thing,” Tsangarides says with a sigh, “because ‘It’ll sound mega, man’. Well, it didn’t. Because you’ve still only got the same frequency spectrum. So the more you put on, the smaller it sounds.”

The sonic inflation couldn’t go on forever, of course. Just as the hair-metal bands of the 80s were rendered archaic by the route-one songcraft of grunge, so the era’s production values were cruelly exposed by a wave of lean incoming albums. “The nineties was a real breath of fresh air, to be honest,” says Tsangarides. “Whether you liked the music or not, things went more back to basics. Y’know, band in a studio, with a producer, ‘one-two-three-four’, off they go.”

 

“It went back to the roots,” says Tempest. “Soundgarden did some great productions. Butch Vig did a great job on Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

 

Three decades later, quantifying the merits of the 80s sound is a slippery task. The lazy, broad-brush consensus is that this was an era whose plump, pompous sonics should serve as a cautionary tale. Closer to the truth, Tempest offers, is that 80s albums must be judged on a case-by-case basis. “Some of those productions are hard to listen to today. But that’s not to say it was all worse. If you listen to Whitesnake’s 1987, it’s pushed to the limit. But it’s still one of my favourites. Appetite For Destruction was pushed a bit, but it was an actual sound. Martin Birch’s productions for Iron Maiden were great. Aerosmith and Bruce Fairbairn with Pump, that still sounded like a real band. Europe? I think we were on the right side. We didn’t push things too much. But a lot of productions did.”

 

 

If you frosted your tips it was game on.  Oh, and a little coke.  I was burner so I didn’t quite get the hot 80s, @touch?  Though I have to say a lot of my favorites are from the 80s, but most of the bands were 70s holdovers except REM.

Edited August 13, 2023 by Petethreeput

[TiScape]

21 minutes ago, Double Mocha Man said:

oops!

 

20 minutes ago, chisag said:

 

 

... We all like what we like as it should be, but just sayin this is a pretty good take on 80's production:


There’s no mistaking the super-sized sheen of an 80s rock album – but what’s the story behind that sound, and does it deserve such criticism?
 

The popular perception of an 80s rock record goes something like this. A gated snare drum going off like a gunshot. Synths, samples and digital drums jostling for elbow room in an airtight multitracked mix. A production job as shiny as the compact disc sliding into a yuppie’s Bang & Olufsen. And, most of all, a sense of unsustainable size, like bubblegum blown up too far.

It’s a glib stereotype, of course – but only just. “Everything was pushed to the limit in the eighties,” Europe frontman Joey Tempest remembers. “It was a decade of flamboyance and pushing all the faders, a hundred per cent.”
 

Rewind just a little further, to the 70s, and rock’n’roll wasn’t rocket science. Back then a studio was a bare-bones, all-analogue world with a human heartbeat, where records lived or died on the skill of the musicians on the floor. “If you had a drummer that could keep time, life was good,” recalls veteran producer Keith Olsen, famed for his work with Fleetwood Mac, Ozzy Osbourne and Whitesnake. “If you had a great guitar player, it was wonderful. If the songs were there, it was even better. Y’know, it was songs, performance and sound, in that order.”

“In the seventies, you had a tape recorder,” picks up Chris Tsangarides, who has worked as producer for heavyweights including Thin Lizzy and Judas Priest. “You had a microphone, a guitar with an amplifier, and a drum set. Maybe a few compressors, some reverberation plates, a bit of delay. Back then it centred on how good the band was. Then we hit the eighties and there was all this technology thrown at us. It went from tape to digital in about three seconds, and it was a bit of the emperor’s new clothes. In the eighties it was all about the production.”
 

Previously, an adventurous rock band would rely on Heath Robinson-style ingenuity, from John Bonham recording his levee-breaking beats in a stairwell, to Queen recreating a tap-dancer using thimbles on Seaside Rendezvous. As hardware arrived from the tech giants of Japan and America, trailblazing sounds were just a keypad away. “The biggest technological development,” Olsen says, “was multitrack recording.”
 

“Those eighties records were so heavily overdubbed – because you could,” Tsangarides explains. “Until about 1974 it was sixteen-track. After that it was twenty-four-track. Then in the eighties it started to be two twenty-four-tracks together with a synchroniser. And they did Sgt. Pepper’s on four tracks, so that puts it into perspective. Us producers were coming out with all this: ‘Oh, I used twenty million tracks to do that song.’ ‘Well I used even more.’ ‘Have you heard Mutt Lange was using five billion tracks?’ It was like Chinese whispers. But really it was all to do with trying to get this ultimate, big, huge sound.”
 

Leppard, at least, were still in thrall to the electric guitar, an instrument that had been the uncontested tool of rock since the 50s. Elsewhere, Joey Tempest recalls, when the synth landed it not only dictated the sound of the era, but also directed the creative process. “All these new toys came into play. Europe used to be a guitar-based band, but all of a sudden, in the guitar shop, there was another room full of synths. So it was like, ‘Whoa, what’s this?’ The Final Countdown had more keyboards because that’s what I was writing on. But some bands really did put on a lot of keyboards, and then the guitars sort of disappeared in the mix. I remember John Norum [Europe’s lead guitarist] was frustrated with how the guitars were pushed back.”
 

It was a familiar headache for Tsangarides, too: “You’d have these huge banks of keyboards hooked up together by MIDI – one playing strings, one playing organ, whatever you wanted – and get this absolutely massive sound. But when you put it into the track, you couldn’t hear the guitar. It just didn’t marry at all. I’d think: ‘How come I can put on a Deep Purple or Uriah Heep album from back in the day and I can hear everything? What’s going on?’ Then it dawned on me that, y’know, that was all analogue equipment.”

 

Ironically, the ubiquitous gated drum sound began as a quest to emulate those 70s productions. “People were after the Bonham sound,” explains Tsangarides. “But this wasn’t it. The gated drum sound is a short reverb that has a noise gate on it, so it cuts it off. It’s just like – bam! This is the sound Phil Collins used on his toms for In The Air Tonight. I used to hear it all the bloody time. You had this fricking loud snare drum, and then some poor sod trying to get his guitar heard above it.”

 

Even further removed from Bonham’s monster Ludwig kit were the thin hexagonal pads of Dave Simmons’ nascent electronic drums, launched in 1980. “On their own they sounded like arse,” says Tsangarides. “But on Thin Lizzy’s Thunder And Lightning I triggered a set of Simmons toms from Brian Downey’s drum kit and mixed them in with the real drums. That’s why that album sounds like it does, in a way.” Even when it came to the latter stages of a record, the producer adds, there were expectations. “You couldn’t mix a record unless you had five hundred bits of outboard gear. There was this thing called the Aphex Aural Exciter. You couldn’t buy it. You couldn’t rent it. What would happen was, you used this machine on your final mix and they’d charge you something like seventy-five pounds for every minute of song. And all it did was make everything sound really toppy. Pointless. But it was like, ‘You’ve got to have one of these… because they’ve got one!’”

 

As well as one-upmanship, producers were also motivated by the prevailing media. “Radio in America was so important for all these producers,” Tempest points out. “And the ones that had a brain understood the expansion and the limited EQ that radio actually added, and they didn’t push things too much.” “The CD format was a factor, too,” says Tsangarides. “Because here’s the thing: when you mixed for a record, there were certain criteria. You couldn’t make the vocals too bright. Too much bass, the needle jumps out of the groove. When CDs came along, good, bad or indifferent, however much bass or treble you had – even if it sounded total arse – it would still reproduce. So that stuff did have an effect on things.”

 

As did the financial health of the 80s record industry. “I was lucky enough to be looked after by Zomba Management,” says Tsangarides, “who also had Martin Birch, Mutt Lange, Tony Platt. Battery Studios was our home from home in London. And it was like: ‘What do you need?’ Any piece of equipment, any mic, you could have it. They put this ethos in you that it has to be the best. They’d never look down their noses, like: ‘It’s taken you six months to make the record.’ Good grief, no. It was all: ‘Oh, we’ll go to Barbados to record the bass drum.’ It got silly. I think we did disappear up our own jacksies.”

 

It’s important to differentiate, says Tempest, between the 80s producers who struck a balance and those who created monsters. “You had the guys who understood how to do it, like Mutt Lange, Martin Birch, Bob Rock, Bruce Fairbairn, Ted Templeman – usually the ones who started in the seventies. But they were the good guys. Then there was the younger breed coming in who would push it even more. Towards the end of the eighties it was the kitchen sink, basically. People thought it sounded bigger, but it didn’t. When everything was done, you’d compare it to a straightforward rock album and you realised, ‘Hang on, it got smaller.’”

 

“People would put on eighteen tracks of guitar doing the same thing,” Tsangarides says with a sigh, “because ‘It’ll sound mega, man’. Well, it didn’t. Because you’ve still only got the same frequency spectrum. So the more you put on, the smaller it sounds.”

The sonic inflation couldn’t go on forever, of course. Just as the hair-metal bands of the 80s were rendered archaic by the route-one songcraft of grunge, so the era’s production values were cruelly exposed by a wave of lean incoming albums. “The nineties was a real breath of fresh air, to be honest,” says Tsangarides. “Whether you liked the music or not, things went more back to basics. Y’know, band in a studio, with a producer, ‘one-two-three-four’, off they go.”

 

“It went back to the roots,” says Tempest. “Soundgarden did some great productions. Butch Vig did a great job on Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

 

Three decades later, quantifying the merits of the 80s sound is a slippery task. The lazy, broad-brush consensus is that this was an era whose plump, pompous sonics should serve as a cautionary tale. Closer to the truth, Tempest offers, is that 80s albums must be judged on a case-by-case basis. “Some of those productions are hard to listen to today. But that’s not to say it was all worse. If you listen to Whitesnake’s 1987, it’s pushed to the limit. But it’s still one of my favourites. Appetite For Destruction was pushed a bit, but it was an actual sound. Martin Birch’s productions for Iron Maiden were great. Aerosmith and Bruce Fairbairn with Pump, that still sounded like a real band. Europe? I think we were on the right side. We didn’t push things too much. But a lot of productions did.”

 

 

Damn chi! Making blades posts look short!! 😱 Gonna need a bookmark for this one

Edited August 13, 2023 by TiScape

[chisag]

10 minutes ago, Double Mocha Man said:

 

Good novel chisag.  You're not playing golf today, are you?  If I typed that much my fingers would be so sore I couldn't go to the course the next day.  😁

 

 

... I may not understand more than the simplest basics of IT, but I do know how to Copy and Paste. 🤪

[braincramp52]

48 minutes ago, chisag said:

 

 

... We all like what we like as it should be, but just sayin this is a pretty good take on 80's production:


There’s no mistaking the super-sized sheen of an 80s rock album – but what’s the story behind that sound, and does it deserve such criticism?
 

The popular perception of an 80s rock record goes something like this. A gated snare drum going off like a gunshot. Synths, samples and digital drums jostling for elbow room in an airtight multitracked mix. A production job as shiny as the compact disc sliding into a yuppie’s Bang & Olufsen. And, most of all, a sense of unsustainable size, like bubblegum blown up too far.

It’s a glib stereotype, of course – but only just. “Everything was pushed to the limit in the eighties,” Europe frontman Joey Tempest remembers. “It was a decade of flamboyance and pushing all the faders, a hundred per cent.”
 

Rewind just a little further, to the 70s, and rock’n’roll wasn’t rocket science. Back then a studio was a bare-bones, all-analogue world with a human heartbeat, where records lived or died on the skill of the musicians on the floor. “If you had a drummer that could keep time, life was good,” recalls veteran producer Keith Olsen, famed for his work with Fleetwood Mac, Ozzy Osbourne and Whitesnake. “If you had a great guitar player, it was wonderful. If the songs were there, it was even better. Y’know, it was songs, performance and sound, in that order.”

“In the seventies, you had a tape recorder,” picks up Chris Tsangarides, who has worked as producer for heavyweights including Thin Lizzy and Judas Priest. “You had a microphone, a guitar with an amplifier, and a drum set. Maybe a few compressors, some reverberation plates, a bit of delay. Back then it centred on how good the band was. Then we hit the eighties and there was all this technology thrown at us. It went from tape to digital in about three seconds, and it was a bit of the emperor’s new clothes. In the eighties it was all about the production.”
 

Previously, an adventurous rock band would rely on Heath Robinson-style ingenuity, from John Bonham recording his levee-breaking beats in a stairwell, to Queen recreating a tap-dancer using thimbles on Seaside Rendezvous. As hardware arrived from the tech giants of Japan and America, trailblazing sounds were just a keypad away. “The biggest technological development,” Olsen says, “was multitrack recording.”
 

“Those eighties records were so heavily overdubbed – because you could,” Tsangarides explains. “Until about 1974 it was sixteen-track. After that it was twenty-four-track. Then in the eighties it started to be two twenty-four-tracks together with a synchroniser. And they did Sgt. Pepper’s on four tracks, so that puts it into perspective. Us producers were coming out with all this: ‘Oh, I used twenty million tracks to do that song.’ ‘Well I used even more.’ ‘Have you heard Mutt Lange was using five billion tracks?’ It was like Chinese whispers. But really it was all to do with trying to get this ultimate, big, huge sound.”
 

Leppard, at least, were still in thrall to the electric guitar, an instrument that had been the uncontested tool of rock since the 50s. Elsewhere, Joey Tempest recalls, when the synth landed it not only dictated the sound of the era, but also directed the creative process. “All these new toys came into play. Europe used to be a guitar-based band, but all of a sudden, in the guitar shop, there was another room full of synths. So it was like, ‘Whoa, what’s this?’ The Final Countdown had more keyboards because that’s what I was writing on. But some bands really did put on a lot of keyboards, and then the guitars sort of disappeared in the mix. I remember John Norum [Europe’s lead guitarist] was frustrated with how the guitars were pushed back.”
 

It was a familiar headache for Tsangarides, too: “You’d have these huge banks of keyboards hooked up together by MIDI – one playing strings, one playing organ, whatever you wanted – and get this absolutely massive sound. But when you put it into the track, you couldn’t hear the guitar. It just didn’t marry at all. I’d think: ‘How come I can put on a Deep Purple or Uriah Heep album from back in the day and I can hear everything? What’s going on?’ Then it dawned on me that, y’know, that was all analogue equipment.”

 

Ironically, the ubiquitous gated drum sound began as a quest to emulate those 70s productions. “People were after the Bonham sound,” explains Tsangarides. “But this wasn’t it. The gated drum sound is a short reverb that has a noise gate on it, so it cuts it off. It’s just like – bam! This is the sound Phil Collins used on his toms for In The Air Tonight. I used to hear it all the bloody time. You had this fricking loud snare drum, and then some poor sod trying to get his guitar heard above it.”

 

Even further removed from Bonham’s monster Ludwig kit were the thin hexagonal pads of Dave Simmons’ nascent electronic drums, launched in 1980. “On their own they sounded like arse,” says Tsangarides. “But on Thin Lizzy’s Thunder And Lightning I triggered a set of Simmons toms from Brian Downey’s drum kit and mixed them in with the real drums. That’s why that album sounds like it does, in a way.” Even when it came to the latter stages of a record, the producer adds, there were expectations. “You couldn’t mix a record unless you had five hundred bits of outboard gear. There was this thing called the Aphex Aural Exciter. You couldn’t buy it. You couldn’t rent it. What would happen was, you used this machine on your final mix and they’d charge you something like seventy-five pounds for every minute of song. And all it did was make everything sound really toppy. Pointless. But it was like, ‘You’ve got to have one of these… because they’ve got one!’”

 

As well as one-upmanship, producers were also motivated by the prevailing media. “Radio in America was so important for all these producers,” Tempest points out. “And the ones that had a brain understood the expansion and the limited EQ that radio actually added, and they didn’t push things too much.” “The CD format was a factor, too,” says Tsangarides. “Because here’s the thing: when you mixed for a record, there were certain criteria. You couldn’t make the vocals too bright. Too much bass, the needle jumps out of the groove. When CDs came along, good, bad or indifferent, however much bass or treble you had – even if it sounded total arse – it would still reproduce. So that stuff did have an effect on things.”

 

As did the financial health of the 80s record industry. “I was lucky enough to be looked after by Zomba Management,” says Tsangarides, “who also had Martin Birch, Mutt Lange, Tony Platt. Battery Studios was our home from home in London. And it was like: ‘What do you need?’ Any piece of equipment, any mic, you could have it. They put this ethos in you that it has to be the best. They’d never look down their noses, like: ‘It’s taken you six months to make the record.’ Good grief, no. It was all: ‘Oh, we’ll go to Barbados to record the bass drum.’ It got silly. I think we did disappear up our own jacksies.”

 

It’s important to differentiate, says Tempest, between the 80s producers who struck a balance and those who created monsters. “You had the guys who understood how to do it, like Mutt Lange, Martin Birch, Bob Rock, Bruce Fairbairn, Ted Templeman – usually the ones who started in the seventies. But they were the good guys. Then there was the younger breed coming in who would push it even more. Towards the end of the eighties it was the kitchen sink, basically. People thought it sounded bigger, but it didn’t. When everything was done, you’d compare it to a straightforward rock album and you realised, ‘Hang on, it got smaller.’”

 

“People would put on eighteen tracks of guitar doing the same thing,” Tsangarides says with a sigh, “because ‘It’ll sound mega, man’. Well, it didn’t. Because you’ve still only got the same frequency spectrum. So the more you put on, the smaller it sounds.”

The sonic inflation couldn’t go on forever, of course. Just as the hair-metal bands of the 80s were rendered archaic by the route-one songcraft of grunge, so the era’s production values were cruelly exposed by a wave of lean incoming albums. “The nineties was a real breath of fresh air, to be honest,” says Tsangarides. “Whether you liked the music or not, things went more back to basics. Y’know, band in a studio, with a producer, ‘one-two-three-four’, off they go.”

 

“It went back to the roots,” says Tempest. “Soundgarden did some great productions. Butch Vig did a great job on Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

 

Three decades later, quantifying the merits of the 80s sound is a slippery task. The lazy, broad-brush consensus is that this was an era whose plump, pompous sonics should serve as a cautionary tale. Closer to the truth, Tempest offers, is that 80s albums must be judged on a case-by-case basis. “Some of those productions are hard to listen to today. But that’s not to say it was all worse. If you listen to Whitesnake’s 1987, it’s pushed to the limit. But it’s still one of my favourites. Appetite For Destruction was pushed a bit, but it was an actual sound. Martin Birch’s productions for Iron Maiden were great. Aerosmith and Bruce Fairbairn with Pump, that still sounded like a real band. Europe? I think we were on the right side. We didn’t push things too much. But a lot of productions did.”

 

 

So, what's your point? 🙂

[aenemated]

41 minutes ago, chisag said:

“People were after the Bonham sound”

 

Funny it references the 70s so much and focuses purely on Bonzo. 

 

Cuz if there's any era of garbage drum tone; it's the 70s. Just freakin choked to death in all those godawful, boring-azz bands in those days. It's WHY Bonzo stood out so much and it really wasn't even him specifically, it was Jimmy Page's brilliant production work. Pagey produced all those records and every tune on every record was built with a sound in mind. He doesn't get nearly the credit he deserves as a producer. 

 

This isn't to say 80s tones didn't suck. They absolutely did.

 

Ms. aenemated loves the 80's post-punk stuff. Because ... well, 80s Valley Girl ...

 

 

She'd kill me for showing that one 😂

[chisag]

6 minutes ago, braincramp52 said:

So, what's your point? 🙂

 

... Well, I guess more hair and more tracks isn't always better.  🙉


 

[aenemated]

Anyway, I got on a Gram tip coming home from the gig last night. Cuz damn, this is one of the greatest albums ever. 

 

 

With the master, the great James Burton! 

[chisag]

14 minutes ago, aenemated said:

 

Funny it references the 70s so much and focuses purely on Bonzo. 

 

Cuz if there's any era of garbage drum tone; it's the 70s. Just freakin choked to death in all those godawful, boring-azz bands in those days. It's WHY Bonzo stood out so much and it really wasn't even him specifically, it was Jimmy Page's brilliant production work. Pagey produced all those records and every tune on every record was built with a sound in mind. He doesn't get nearly the credit he deserves as a producer. 

 

This isn't to say 80s tones didn't suck. They absolutely did.

 

Ms. aenemated loves the 80's post-punk stuff. Because ... well, 80s Valley Girl ...

 

She'd kill me for showing that one 😂

 

 

... Thanks, I was looking forward to your take on this. And as far as pictures are concerned, and the wonderful 70's I talk about, they day they took our football pictures my senior year they locked all the doors but the main entrance. The measured your hair with a ruler and if your "bangs" were longer than 1" or it touched your color in the back or your ears on the side, you weren't allowed in the school until you went and had it cut. But for those of us on the football team the Coach had clippers and cut it right there on the sidewalk and we certainly looked like it LOL! 😜  Todays parent would be filing law suits but back then our parents just said "Do what ya gotta do Coach".  








 

Edited August 14, 2023 by chisag

[TiScape]

17 minutes ago, aenemated said:

 

Funny it references the 70s so much and focuses purely on Bonzo. 

 

Cuz if there's any era of garbage drum tone; it's the 70s. Just freakin choked to death in all those godawful, boring-azz bands in those days. It's WHY Bonzo stood out so much and it really wasn't even him specifically, it was Jimmy Page's brilliant production work. Pagey produced all those records and every tune on every record was built with a sound in mind. He doesn't get nearly the credit he deserves as a producer. 

 

This isn't to say 80s tones didn't suck. They absolutely did.

 

Ms. aenemated loves the 80's post-punk stuff. Because ... well, 80s Valley Girl ...

 

 

She'd kill me for showing that one 😂

So wait, you read all that???

[Double Mocha Man]

3 minutes ago, chisag said:

 

 

#71 looks like he might have been a pretty good lineman.  At least he had the scowl for it...

[chisag]

5 minutes ago, Double Mocha Man said:

 

#71 looks like he might have been a pretty good lineman.  At least he had the scowl for it...

 

 

... That's only half the picture of the team but yea, Jimmy played NT and was a farm boy that didn't much care for a Big City like Greensboro NC. 🤣

[miamistomp]

 My 70's pick

 

[chisag]

11 minutes ago, TiScape said:

So wait, you read all that???

 

 

 

 

 

[Nard_S]

 

 

 

 

[aenemated]

18 minutes ago, TiScape said:

So wait, you read all that???

 

I mean, it wasn't The Brothers Karamazov 😂

[miamistomp]

 

[TiScape]

45 minutes ago, aenemated said:

 

I mean, it wasn't The Brothers Karamazov 😂

Googling…

[TiScape]

Just now, TiScape said:

Googling…

840 page book! Got it and ✔️ 

[TiScape]

57 minutes ago, chisag said:

 

 

 

 

 

Do you recall my reading comprehension skills??? Enough said 😉

[touch]

1 hour ago, chisag said:

 

 

... Thanks, I was looking forward to your take on this. And as far as pictures are concerned, and the wonderful 70's I talk about, they day they took our football pictures my senior year they locked all the doors but the main entrance. The measured your hair with a ruler and if your "bangs" were longer than 1" or it touched your color in the back or your ears on the side, you weren't allowed in the school until you went and had it cut. But for those of us on the football team the Coach had clippers and cut it right there on the sidewalk and we certainly looked like it LOL! 😜  Todays parent would be filing law suits but back then our parents just said "Do what ya gotta do Coach".  








 

 

So which one is the QB? Third row sixth from left? 

[TiScape]

Safe to say you fellas are more well read than me and smarter to boot! Thankfully what they say about ignorance being bliss is true! Ur boy’s always happy 😊