Terrible Recordings that sound beautiful

[porfiry]

George Martin was indeed a genius producer, and he took the Beatles places they almost certainly wouldn't have gone with a lesser man turning the knobs; however, they still wrote the songs. Really great songs. Songs it's sometimes a little hard to believe were written by mere mortals, frankly.

[ethios4]

My favorite from the Mix articles, re: Fine Young Cannibals "She Drives Me Crazy"...

I took the head off a snare drum and started whacking it with a wooden ruler, recording it through a Shure 57 microphone,” he says. “As I did that, I started twisting the hell out of the [API 550] EQ around 1 kHz on it, to the point where it was starting to sound more like a crash. I blended that with a snare I found in the Linn itself, which was a 12-bit machine, so it sounded pretty edgy to start with.” But the coup de grace for the sound was when Z pumped the processed and blended sample through an Auratone speaker set upside down atop another snare drum, which rattled the metal snares and gave the result some ambience and even more high end. The whole thing was limited slightly and then sent to a track on a roll of Ampex 456 running on a Studer A800 at 15 ips. Only a slight amount of reverb was added to the track later on. The sonic result was closer to a hollow wood block sound than any snare found on a conventional rock record, and in becoming, along with Gift's vocals, the signature of the song, it would go on to have many lives of its own subsequent to the single's run up the charts.

Man that's some in-depth production for a snare!

[porfiry]

Think how much work could have been avoided, if they'd simply had Operator Synthdrum.