An interview with Maureen Droney (Mix Magazine's Los Angeles editor)

I ended up, fortunately for me, at a place called Wessex, which, without me really knowing about it, was one of the hottest places in town. It was in London, in an old church hall, and a lot of records were being done there that I really liked, Queen and so forth.

That’s where I met Mutt Lange, who was a relatively newish producer on the scene, carving out his name producing interesting younger bands.

Working in England at that time and at that studio, you could get taught by the most amazing people. Tim Friese-Greene was Mutt’s engineer at the time; I assisted him, and there was such inventive engineering. It was a great foundation, and you learned the ropes really well.

I was still pretty much a kid and flying by the seat of my pants when Mutt asked me to come and help him setup Battery Studios. I remember we were looking at consoles and this manager wanted to get something cheap and cheerful like an MCI, a good workhorse.

Do you think there’s a “Mike Shipley” sound?

I don’t really know. There was sound of the records in the Def Leppard era that was conceptualized between Mutt and myself. We’d have to invent types of drum sounds, because his thing was always, “Let’s do something different. It can’t ever be the same, it can’t ever be just a boring drum sound, it has to be Star Wars! Everyone is watching Star Wars films and seeing things that are very three dimensional, so let’s not just have this little boring drum sound that everyone goes for. Let’s make it big, different, larger than life.”

Larger than life is the definition of those records. It seems impossible that anybody could get so much top, so much bottom, so many effects, so many parts -- so much of everything crammed onto a piece of tape.

Mutt was just brilliant. There’s so much depth of field to the way he produced those records in terms of the parts. The concept of how to make the drums sound and how to make the guitars sound and how to stack up hundreds of tracks of backgrounds. There were so many layers -- it would take huge amounts of time to be as experimental as you could possibly be and then to start again and try a different approach altogether, let alone the time it would take to mix!

I remember at the beginning of Pyromania there was no idea of how we were going to do the drums. All Mutt was saying was that we’d have to figure out some way to do the drums in the end. The drums would be one of the last things to get done, so it was, “Wonder how we’re gonna do them, I’m sure we’ll figure out something.”

It seems like these projects took on a life of their own, almost like they couldn’t be controlled.

It was never out of control with Mutt, but because he’s so involved in the whole process, he’d get to a stage where you had a song finished, we thought -- we’d busted our balls, spending days on guitar sounds, days on vocal sounds -- and he’d change the chorus.

With Mutt we always have programmable equalizers where we can EQ every word, SSL equalizers where we can automate ever consonant or ever word if we want --literally, every part of every word.

You’re an expert at balancing lots of parts.

It’s one of those things, having spent so many years working with people such as Mutt whose whole thing is depth of field and whose whole concept is layering, so that even if something is just subtly audible, it’s adding depth of field.

Say on Shania Twain’s “Still The One”, when you get to the mix, how many tracks of those backgrounds of Mutt and Shania are you working with?

I think on that probably 12 tracks, maybe six pairs.

They really are gorgeous, the way they lift up the record.

It’s one of the characteristic things Mutt does, and the does it really fast, just bashes through them; he sets the ‘mic’ up in the control room, hammers down 20 or 30 tracks, or whatever’s needed of each part.

Follow this link to visit Mix Magazine Online and check out this quality publication.

(Thanks also to Martin Courcy for the fantastic tip!)