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Post by maddogfagin on Jun 20, 2011 12:13:50 GMT
Tim Chacksfield at EMI will be conducting a telephone interview with John Burns (engineer on the Aqualung sessions) for inclusion in the booklet on the new release.
Tim has offered that if we submit any questions we have to him then he will arrange for our questions to be included in the interview but any questions must be posted on the Forum by tomorrow evening at the latest, Tuesday 21 June.
Thanks to Hollowmoor for arranging this.
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Post by maddogfagin on Jun 20, 2011 12:32:48 GMT
The initial Aqualung sessions were recorded at Morgan Studios but then the sessions switched to the “new” and more technically advanced Island studios and those songs previously recorded at Morgan were re-recorded. Do these initial sessions still exist and if they do, what sort of finished state are they in.
Jeffrey Hammond freely admits that he had to get himself “up to speed” with the bass whereas Glenn Cornick is a more natural player. How much time would have been taken with Jeffrey to learn the parts required of him and, in retrospect, how much of Glenn’s work appeared on the final Aqualung recording.
Graham, Cornwall.
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Post by jstger6969 on Jun 20, 2011 13:19:46 GMT
Hello John, Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions. Is there any live material from that era to be included in the aqualung package. Does it included the line up that recorded the LP. Also will there be a vinyl reissue of this package? Thank you John, Boston
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Post by paiste2002 on Jun 20, 2011 13:44:00 GMT
First of all thank you for taking the time to answer our questions!
I would like to know what you might remember about how the drums were recorded, how many mics were used, mic placement? Were they recorded in the same room as the rest of the instruments or were the drums secluded. Do you remember how long it took to find the exact drum sound Ian was looking for?
Thank you!
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Post by oksauce on Jun 20, 2011 18:08:01 GMT
Hello John
Are you aware of any songs, or fragments of songs, that Ian was writing or had partly written, during the making of the album that were never recorded for whatever reason? It'd be interesting to hear the titles of such songs if they exist.
To what extent had Ian thought about the interconnecting themes of certain songs in the allbum before starting to make the album, and how much did the idea of these themes develop during the recording process?Also, how much did the songs develop during the recording in terms of arrangement, instrumentation and so on? For instance, Locomotive Breath was sort of written in the studio, and I wonder if this applied to many other songs on the album.
Thanks a lot!
Tom, 17, Swansea
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Post by bunkerfan on Jun 20, 2011 19:12:51 GMT
Hi John, 2 quick questions. Can you remember which track gave you the biggest engineering headache and which one still gives you the most satisfaction at being a part of the album. Cheers John (County Durham)
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Post by hollowmoor on Jun 20, 2011 20:34:55 GMT
Hi John, After recording at Morgan Studios throughout 1969 and the first half of 1970, why was recording switched to Island studios in December 1970? I've read reports that Tull had experienced problems at Morgan studios and that Island studios was more technically advanced but wasn't Morgan studios considered to be a cutting edge studio? Weren't they renown for having the first 24 track machine a year or two later?
With Jethro Tull and Led Zeppelin recording at Island studios at the same time what was the atmosphere like between the bands and their roadies? Were there any particular friendships formed or signs of animosity between band members? Martin Barre recalls Jimmy Page walking into the control room while he was recording the guitar solo in Aqualung. Do you remember this?
Do you recall the two separate sessions for Aqualung in December 1970 and in February 1971? Was the album effectively recorded twice as Jeffrey Hammond and John Evans have both indictated in recent interviews or is the truth closer to a report in the NME in early '71 that only 3 songs were rerecorded in February to better reflect the song arrangements that the band had been playing on stage during January '71?
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Post by rttullfan on Jun 24, 2011 18:07:31 GMT
Can we have Tim Chacksfield's email address?
I know many people on this forum and several other Tull and surround sound forums wish to express the desire for the new reissue to include DVD-Audio or SACD.
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Post by hollowmoor on Jun 25, 2011 22:23:13 GMT
The people at EMI preparing the release are well aware of the desire for a high res audio platform and Steven Wilson has also been trying his best to push for blu-ray or DVD-audio but it's the accountants who decide these things unfortunately. All is not lost however, someone over on the Steve Hoffman forums has contacted EMI Canada via their website and EMI were inviting people to register their interest in a high res option. This seems to have reached 'saturation point' now and the file they kept has been forwarded to the release team. www.stevehoffman.tv/forums/showthread.php?t=249630&highlight=tull&page=13This is the right way to go about it. Petitions do often get the desired results in these situations. Contacting individual people en masse does not. It will only serve to irritate and annoy.
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Post by rttullfan on Jun 26, 2011 19:17:53 GMT
Yeah, I guess you're right. I've already contacted EMI Canada myself as have many others, as you've pointed out, so I hope this works, even if it means that the release will get pushed back a month or two.
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kleynan
Journeyman
Thick as a Brick
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Post by kleynan on Jul 8, 2011 16:14:15 GMT
Thanks for agreeing to answer our questions!
Could you by any chance tell us if the remixed Aqualung album will be released on original Vinyl too?
Kleynan, Denmark
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Post by hollowmoor on Jul 21, 2011 19:48:25 GMT
Hello all, Dom Lawson (from Classic Rock magazine in the UK) has conducted his interview with Johnnie Burns but didn't have time to include any of our more technical questions so I've been in contact with Johnnie myself to talk about this aspect of the Aqualung recording. Johnnie's a lovely chap, very obliging and easy to talk to and is very enthusiastic when discussing the technicalities of a recording studio. During our first chat on the phone when we were organising the time to do the interview the following week I discovered that Johnnie has been Tull's sound man on tour during 1970 and early '71. I couldn't help jumping the gun and asking an obvious question: 'Did you ever record the band from the soundboard?'. Unfortunately the answer was "no". He was far to busy doing the sound and it never occurred to him. Oh well.... Anyway the interview has been done and the conversations went well beyond Aqualung taking in his time at Morgan Studios working on Stand Up and Benefit and on the road. I'll be uploading the full transcript soon (if EMI don't want us to hold it back for a while) but in the mean time here's some background to Johnnie's career away from Tull including some vintage and recent photos and an interview exploring his work with Genesis: www.jebomusic.co.uk/johnnieburns/John_Burns_Official_Website.html
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Post by maddogfagin on Jul 22, 2011 7:52:23 GMT
Hello all, Dom Lawson (from Classic Rock magazine in the UK) has conducted his interview with Johnnie Burns but didn't have time to include any of our more technical questions so I've been in contact with Johnnie myself to talk about this aspect of the Aqualung recording. Johnnie's a lovely chap, very obliging and easy to talk to and is very enthusiastic when discussing the technicalities of a recording studio. During our first chat on the phone when we were organising the time to do the interview the following week I discovered that Johnnie has been Tull's sound man on tour during 1970 and early '71. I couldn't help jumping the gun and asking an obvious question: 'Did you ever record the band from the soundboard?'. Unfortunately the answer was "no". He was far to busy doing the sound and it never occurred to him. Oh well.... Anyway the interview has been done and the conversations went well beyond Aqualung taking in his time at Morgan Studios working on Stand Up and Benefit and on the road. I'll be uploading the full transcript soon (if EMI don't want us to hold it back for a while) but in the mean time here's some background to Johnnie's career away from Tull including some vintage and recent photos and an interview exploring his work with Genesis: www.jebomusic.co.uk/johnnieburns/John_Burns_Official_Website.htmlThanks for your efforts - look forward to reading it in due course.
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Post by hollowmoor on Jul 22, 2011 21:31:33 GMT
OK chaps (and chapesses) here's part 1 of the interview with Johnnie Burns. Part 2 - 'recording Aqualung' (including the questions submitted by forum members) will appear after the new set has been released (EMI will be using some of it) Interview with John Burns conducted on 13th July 2011.Jethro Tull first recorded at Morgan Studios in November 1968 producing the Love Story/A Christmas Song single. Was this your first involvement with the band?Yes, I was working at Morgan in ’68. I remember Martin Barre coming in for Stand Up and being terribly shy but a good guitarist, lovely bloke too. What do you remember of the sessions for Stand Up at Morgan?
On Stand Up, Andy Johns on one late session couldn’t get the sound he wanted at Morgan so he rang Olympic studios in Barnes to see if studio 1 was free and it was so we all got into a taxi, left Willesden and all headed off to Barnes, possibly re-did a lead vocal there at the same time. I really liked Olympic and Island [also known as Basing St studios] wasn’t around then. Olympic, I think was an old cinema and closed about two years ago. It had been going a long, long time, everybody in the business recorded there. Was the track you are referring to Bourre? Glenn Cornick’s diary records that Bouree was recorded at Olympic……No, this was another track, it wasn’t Bouree. The track had been recorded but it was just that we wanted to get a different vocal sound and basically wanted to have a play around in a different studio. We literally went down at ten o’clock at night and I just remember asking Andy where the power supplies were for the Neumann 67s. “You’ll find them, go out there and plug it all up” he replied sending me packing! So I think there was a vocal done and a mix, probably three or four hours at Olympic having followed six hours at Morgan but I can’t remember which track it was. Possibly if I listen to Stand Up again I’ll remember. What was your role on Stand Up?Well, tea boy to begin with, tape operator and a ‘go and get the chips’ sort of guy! Obviously running the machines because we had no automation in those days and the multi-track [tape machine] was [across the room from the mixing desk], as an engineer you’d have had to move your chair across the room to press record or wind back [– hence the need for a tape op]. This was a Scully 8-track [1” tape], awful machine. The Scully was unreliable and used to go out of alignment. I remember going into Apple [studios] and they had the same machines as Abbey Road I presume and they were like old ex-BBC valve machines [actually EMI proprietary machines], quite something and they’d jump from one 4-track to another one and probably were far better quality machines. In later days the Studers were the best. Robin Black was also a tape operator at Morgan at the same time working on Stand Up. We did shift work effectively, swapping over, 24 hours on and 24 hours off to stop any other tape operators [getting involved] which would have set us back in progressing as engineers. Sometimes we really worked the full 24 hours. I’d arrive in the morning and record some Jingles, something else in the afternoon and then maybe work with Andy Johns recording Blind Faith until 5am. We agreed it was the best way to work and meant that we would both work on the more interesting sessions [like Stand Up] and not be left with the less rewarding stuff. The tracks Sweet Dream, 17, Singing All Day and Play In Time were recorded in September ’69 at Morgan with Andy Johns, were you involved with these?Very very likely. And the Witch’s Promise/Teacher sessions at Morgan, again with Andy Johns, in December ‘69?I would have been. I might not have been on every session but I probably was. At that stage I’m not sure whether [Morgan] had a second studio by that time. It was a single studio to begin with. One little ‘dead’ room and control room but it got good results. Why the switch in January 1970 from Andy Johns to Robin Black in the engineer’s chair for the Benefit album?
I think Andy was moving on to do other bands. He was doing all sorts of bands, he was one of the highly rated engineers. He was doing bands like Humble Pie and probably either he didn’t have enough time [to work with Tull] or he got fed up with Ian! Andy was a real rock and roller, Ian was a different kettle of fish really so he probably just moved on. Robin was a tape operator at the same time as me but he was a year further on in experience. Andy had left Morgan by this time, I think he had gone freelance and was doing a lot more work at Olympic and places like that. Because Ian actually knew exactly what he wanted and by this stage, he knew a certain amount about engineering and Robin had got to know Ian really well and had started engineering so Ian took him on basically. Do you recall John Evans joining the band? Again, he was a friend of Ian’s. He was very nervous but a good keyboard player Did the atmosphere change in the studio during Benefit with the band now having a fifth member?
I don’t think so. There was a good atmosphere really on that album as far as I can remember. I think things deteriorated with Clive Bunker and Glenn on the years of touring we were doing. Clive wanted to leave and Glenn got fed up with Ian I think. That’s as much as I remember. At what point were you invited to go on tour with Jethro Tull as a sound engineer?Well they wanted Robin Black to go on the road, this must have been [sometime in late ‘69] and he said ‘absolutely no way’ so Terry Ellis asked me. I was just beginning to do some engineering but I was very green at that stage and I said give me six months or so, ask me again when I’ve actually become an engineer and have something behind me. Within six months I was on the road with them, probably after we had recorded Benefit, but that was on the condition, as per Terry Ellis’s offer, that I would fly with the band and be like a sixth member of the band, i.e. not humping gear. The poor roadies had to do all of that! So I didn’t leap into it but the money was good and it was a great experience because we were playing with amazing people like Mountain and Johnny Winters and Hendrix and Joni Mitchell and Ritchie Havens and The Who; the list goes on and on and on. There were big, big festivals [in the summer of 1970] and then when we came to do the Aqualung album that’s when I decided I wanted to leave the road. I wanted to go back into the studio basically. I did the European tour [in early ’71 and then the] UK tour in March and that’s when I left towards the end of the UK leg, possibly after the Blackpool gig. I’d got the new engineer up and running over the previous five or six shows and then left him to it. Steeleye Span were on that tour. They’d done their set and were going back to London and so I went with them. Were there any particular members of the band that you felt close to?Martin and Clive because we used to share rooms to keep the costs down and obviously wanted to make as much money as possible. I shared rooms with either Martin or Clive or Eric Brooks the tour manager so obviously as you’re going from hotel to hotel over eight weeks you become really good buddies. I was really good friends with both of them, I knew them well. [Socializing after the shows] when Jennie [Ian’s first wife] was on tour, Ian didn’t join in. I think Jennie was on all the tours. He would go to his room, didn’t participate at all. It was Terry Ellis, Eric Brooks, Martin, Clive, me and John Evans generally would get together but there would always be [at least] four of us doing something after the gig whether it was playing cards or whatever, getting up to mischief! Was comment ever passed on Ian’s behavior or was it accepted that it was the way he wanted to be?
Yes [it was accepted]. He smoked cigarettes but he didn’t smoke pot and he didn’t drink, not that I drank in those days but we always liked to smoke in the evening, that was Terry Ellis and everybody else as well, it was a nice way to wind down and we’d have a real good laugh. Having spoken on the phone before, I know you are particularly proud of the drum sound you got on the Clouds session in 1970. How do you feel about your first album as an engineer?
On all of the Clouds albums the drum sound was great but if I’d been more experienced I would have done more compression on the organ and bass and brought them closer in as it were. I very rarely use compression on drums but I could have made the sound bigger but I didn’t have the experience. Billy Ritchie [Clouds keyboard player] likes it as it is, but personally I [feel] I could have done better. But that’s because I’m very critical of myself. Check out the Clouds website: www.cloudsmusic.com/An anthology of all 3 Clouds albums can be found on amazon: www.amazon.co.uk/Above-Our-Heads-Clouds-66-71/dp/B0045DO99Q/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1311277929&sr=1-1In recent years you’ve been involved with young prog-rock band JEBO….They’re a great band and I’ve been working with them for about six years but it’s so difficult getting off the ground. If they’d been around in the ‘70s they would have been touring with the likes of Jethro Tull as a support band like Steeleye Span and Procul Harum and Clouds and you get heard that way. But nowadays you’ve got to buy yourself onto a tour and I’ve found it very difficult to get gigs and press for them. I’m not a manager, never pretend to be but I certainly love doing the recording and especially the mixing because my ears have got better over the years, probably because I’m a lot more confident I’ve stepped right back from it and I’m not worrying about what other people think. I say exactly what comes into my head! They enjoy my production, I have to use an engineer to mix as it’s using ProTools and CuBase. It’s the same as analogue except you’ve got to be fast with a computer and I’m not. It’ll take me three hours to find an echo! So they use Ben Findlay on their two albums, I’ve known him for fifteen years or so and he respects me as an analogue engineer and he understands analogue so I can explain it to him and he knows exactly what I’m talking about. Further information can be found on the band’s website: www.jebomusic.co.uk/End of Part 1 Our thanks must go to Johnnie for taking a considerable amount of time out of his days to talk to me and try to remember things that happened over 40 years ago! If anyone has any follow up questions for Johnnie then he is happy to answer them in September when I'm due to talk to him again after he's heard the new mix of Aqualung, all he asks for in return is to spread the word about JEBO. If you've read the inerview then please check out the band and anyone that has any contacts that could lead to bookings then please contact Charlie, the band's manager via the website. Now then, how do we go about getting them a support slot on Tull's next UK tour??
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Post by steelmonkey on Jul 23, 2011 3:23:55 GMT
Thank you all involved...excellent, interesting reading. A real peek into a time so close and so far. Nice to hear from and give thought to all the key players involved who didn't play an instrument but played a major role in rock and roll's finest era.
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Post by maddogfagin on Jul 23, 2011 8:09:18 GMT
Thanks for arranging this hollowmoor and for posting on the Forum. Looking forward to the next installment.
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Post by nonrabbit on Jul 23, 2011 15:25:19 GMT
Big thanks to John Burns and to Hollowmoor - really interesting to get another prospective other than from a band member. Ditto look forward to the rest
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Post by Deleted on Jul 25, 2011 14:00:42 GMT
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Post by hollowmoor on Aug 2, 2011 11:20:35 GMT
The link to Tull is a little tenuous but Island staff engineer Phill Brown was recording Led Zeppelin with Andy Johns in studio 2 whilst Tull were working on Aqualung in studio 1. Phill has a book out 'Are We Still Rolling?' recounting his extensive career as a sound engineer and is an interesting read. Sample chapter here. www.tapeop.com/books/Can be ordered from amazon.co.uk/.com. That's your holiday reading sorted!
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Post by hollowmoor on Oct 31, 2011 22:14:42 GMT
To celebrate 'Aqualung Day' here on the Tull Forum, EMI and Mr A himself have given me the green light to upload part 2 of the interview with Johnnie Burns which is an extended version of that which appears in the box set book. Interview with John Burns conducted on 13th July 2011.
Part 2 - Recording Aqualung After recording at Morgan Studios throughout 1969 and the first half of 1970, why was recording switched to Island studios in December 1970? I've read reports that Tull had experienced problems at Morgan studios and that Island studios was more technically advanced but wasn't Morgan studios considered to be a cutting edge studio? Weren't they renown for having the first 24 track machine a year or two later?
They might have been the first to have 24-track but Island basically was much better with a much ‘live-er’ recording room. Morgan was [acoustically] a completely dead room and also Morgan had a Cadac desk that was not particularly to my liking whereas Basing St (Island studios) had a Helios desk which was very engineer friendly. Ian didn’t want to use any reverb on the Aqualung album and I had mixed Clouds [Watercolour Days album] there in Studio 2 and I loved the desk and liked the vibe at Island and that might have been why we went there. Basing St was, I believe, based on Olympic studios – same make of desk, same monitors etc and that’s also possibly why we ended up going to Basing St. It could, however, have been that Morgan was completely booked up but I really don’t remember that and I definitely rated Basing St after working with Clouds there. With Jethro Tull and Led Zeppelin recording at Island studios at the same time what was the atmosphere like between the bands and their roadies? Were there any particular friendships formed or signs of animosity between band members? Martin Barre recalls Jimmy Page walking into the control room while he was recording the guitar solo in Aqualung. Do you remember this?Yes I think I do, I visited [Led Zeppelin] on their session because Andy Johns, who’s my old friend, was engineering them so I popped in there quite a lot because Ian was going through the bass parts with Jeffrey and there would be time out as it were and I would go and visit the ‘sound’ downstairs which was a BIG sound! I don’t know about any particular friendships, Ian kept himself to himself to the end really. I don’t know about anyone else, I can’t remember about that. Do you recall the two separate sessions for Aqualung in December 1970 and in February 1971? Was the album effectively recorded twice as Jeffrey Hammond and John Evans have both indicated in recent interviews or is the truth closer to a report in the NME in early '71 that only 3 songs were rerecorded in February to better reflect the song arrangements that the band had been playing on stage during January '71?
I don’t remember any songs being re-recorded to be honest. We did a mini tour in early ’71 in Europe I think and I really don’t remember any songs being recorded twice but I could be wrong. That’s some thing I cannot remember but I think I would have remembered. The initial Aqualung sessions were recorded at Morgan Studios but then the sessions switched to the “new” and more technically advanced Island studios and those songs previously recorded at Morgan were re-recorded. Do these initial sessions still exist and if they do, what sort of finished state are they in?
I wasn’t at the Morgan sessions [in June 1970] as I was engineering and producing the Clouds LP for Terry Ellis during that time. Jeffrey Hammond freely admits that he had to get himself “up to speed” with the bass whereas Glenn Cornick is a more natural player. How much time would have been taken with Jeffrey to learn the parts required of him and, in retrospect, how much of Glenn’s work appeared on the final Aqualung recording?I don’t think any of Glenn’s work is on the final recording. Jeffrey was an old friend of Ian’s and he had to learn his parts but Ian took him through them and with Ian’s help he got it all together. But this was when I was visiting Led Zeppelin downstairs because they’d be going through the part and it could be half an hour or so, so I’d leave the studio and go and see my mates downstairs. I would like to know what you might remember about how the drums were recorded, how many mics were used, mic placement? Were they recorded in the same room as the rest of the instruments or were the drums secluded. Do you remember how long it took to find the exact drum sound Ian was looking for?They were done in the same room with probably eight mics, that would be hi-hat, snare, bass drum, two toms and over-heads and probably if [Clive] had two floor toms I would have recorded those on one mic and if he had two small toms I would have recorded those on one mic as well. I know it was four [tracks used on the 16-track] for the drums: one each for bass drum and snare and the rest of the kit in stereo. I don’t think there was a great deal of time getting the sound. I was pretty good at drum sounds. I think it was quite hard because there was no reverb, obviously you wouldn’t put reverb on the 16-track but you could put a little bit on just to see how it would all sound at a later stage when you come to mix it. But as Ian wanted everything dry it might have taken a bit longer but Clive was pretty good at tuning his drums. Why did Ian want a dry sound? From what you’re saying this wasn’t the norm.
No, it wasn’t. I think after Benefit (which was quite ‘swimmy’, but I like that personally) he just wanted to go down another route. I think he just wanted the backing track to be really dead and dry and then obviously there was a certain amount of echo on his vocals and guitar but overall he wanted the backing track to be as dead as a dodo. I can remember what [equipment] I used on Island studio recordings: On the drums I would have had an AKG D20 [microphone] on the bass drum or a D25, a D20 on the floor tom, mid tom and top tom or possibly Neumann U87s, I can’t remember exactly but it would have been one of those two, an AKG 224E on the snare, an AKG 451 on the hi-hat and two Neumann U87s on the overheads. On the amps I would have had an AKG D25 on the bass, a D20 close up on the guitar and probably a U87 forty centimeters away so I had two mics to mix together, piano would have been two Neumann U87s, vocals would have been a U87, [possibly a U67 but] I’m not sure if Basing St had the old U67 valve ones. It was [mostly recorded in studio 1 through] a Helios custom desk 28 channels into 16 group faders and that had built in custom compressors, I think about 4 of them. The 16-track [tape machine] was a 3M which, again, wasn’t the best of machines. The 2-track was a Studer [and there were two of them]. The echo was [via] EMT stereo echo plates, compressors were UREI 1176 compressors and the monitor speakers were four 15” Tannoy Monitor Reds in Lockwood Cabinets. I think there would [also] have been direct injection on the bass, there was probably both [that and the mic’ed amp]. That’s how I generally recorded after that. Bass is a difficult thing to record and with DI at least you’ve got a nice clean signal. Treble is very directional. Bass goes all over the place and has a much longer wavelength so the placing of the mic could affect the sound enormously. If you’ve got [the DI signal] from the bass guitar and it’s a really good take at least you could use that if the bass sound is too ‘boomy’ [from the mic’ed amp]. The bass is generally considered to be a little light on the original Aqualung LP, was this down to the monitor speakers?
It depends where we mixed it. I know we did some mixing in studio 2 [control room], which was a much better room, a much truer [sound than the studio 1 control room]. I remember doing some of Mother Goose in studio 2. I think we did a lot of the mixing in studio 1 and the control room wasn’t [acoustically] accurate and it probably was the bass end that was too heavy so one tended to keep that down. Everybody wanted studio 2 but I don’t think we could always get it. That studio was running 24 hours a day so at the end of the session you had to strip everything down and when you came back in the next day set everything up again. It would have been financially prohibitive to block-book the studio so that you could leave all the equipment up. In those days studios literally worked 24 hours a day. To what extent had Ian thought about the interconnecting themes of certain songs in the album before starting to make the album, and how much did the idea of these themes develop during the recording process? Also, how much did the songs develop during the recording in terms of arrangement, instrumentation and so on? For instance, Locomotive Breath was sort of written in the studio, and I wonder if this applied to many other songs on the album.I could have been partially written in the studio but again I think I was concentrating that much on my catching up with being a studio engineer instead of a live engineer because I’d had eighteen months [on the road] apart from doing the Clouds album. Can you remember which track gave you the biggest engineering headache and which one still gives you the most satisfaction at being a part of the album?
The title track [Aqualung] could have been done in sections and would have meant my first experience of 2” tape editing. It could have been done in sections on the 16-track meaning they would have done the very beginning and Ian would have overdubbed his bit and then they would have started recording the second section - the part that goes down to Ian and an acoustic guitar. Also the sound of the drums in the later sections is different to the opening part. But I’m not sure whether it was done in sections recorded straight on to the tape or whether I edited, but I did become pretty much a master at 2” editing so that could have been my first experience but I really can’t remember, it was done one way or the other and that was probably the hardest track for me to record as far as I can remember because that [way of working] makes things complicated and you really had to have your wits about you. 16-track was not too limiting but you had to watch what you’re doing basically I like Mother Goose. That was my favourite at the time because it was simple. I got a really nice acoustic guitar sound and I really liked Martin Barre’s off beat power chords that he played coming back into the verses and I remember Ian getting Martin to do that instead of on the beat. I was very impressed with that. I really liked that one. Locomotive Breath was one that [Jeffrey] was struggling with and Clive too because that one was very metronomic in certain sections. There’s definitely a ‘chuggy’ guitar on Locomotive Breath. I seem to remember [Ian] doing it basically to keep them in time and that was a real struggle because Jeffrey was a new member of the band and playing incredibly tightly and Clive wasn’t the most ….. he was getting disillusioned with the band and his timing and Ian would have a go at him about his timing. I think if it’s brought to your attention then you become conscious of it and then you lose time and they struggled with that one. Whether it was done on a loop or whether Ian was sat in the room with them while we did the take I can’t remember. Ian had very good timing naturally in his head, he was very good at that. Are you aware of any songs, or fragments of songs, that Ian was writing or had partly written, during the making of the album that were never recorded for whatever reason? It'd be interesting to hear the titles of such songs if they exist.None that I know of. I was concentrating on the studio work when we were working and there might have been bits and pieces done in the studio but none that I can remember. [Ian Anderson has revealed via in interview reproduced somewhere on the net that EMI sent him various tracks of out-takes from the sessions for his approval including at least one unreleased title but he vetoed the unreleased track(s) as it was not up to scratch and didn’t show the band in a good light] Were you involved in the mastering of Aqualung?
I was. I mastered it with Ian at Apple with George Peckham. There was a tiny bit of distortion on one track so we had to go back and re-mix that track and try to [reduce or eliminate the distortion]. It was something I found very difficult to hear but Ian had better ears than me at that time. I was still quite green. I’d been on the road but hadn’t done masses of recording and [Aqualung] was probably my fourth album. I’d done an album with a band that never made it called ‘T2’, I’d done the Clouds album and lots of bits and pieces – little sessions for jingles. End of Part 2
Thanks again must go to John for taking so much of his time to talk to me about a brief period of his life 40 years ago! For further reading here is his official website: www.jebomusic.co.uk/johnnieburns/John_Burns_Official_Website.htmlAs mentioned before, John is currently working with the band JEBO who may be appearing at a festival near you in 2012. Further information can be found on the band’s website: www.jebomusic.co.uk/
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Post by nonrabbit on Nov 1, 2011 8:23:51 GMT
Many thanks Hollowmoor and John
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Post by maddogfagin on Nov 1, 2011 9:03:38 GMT
Thanks for posting Hollowmoor. The hard work certainly paid off.
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