I don't think anyone had done it before, but we decided to give it a shot – scary as it was – and we just went on blind faith. Rather than commit to the drums, and have to re-cut them and re-cut them, he thought this was a better way to do it. Songs would evolve, and he wanted to have control until the last minute of what the feel was going to be. So even when "Photograph" was about to be mixed, Mutt decided to change the chorus.
It was experimental we were using a Fairlight, trying to sync that whole thing up and work like that, and we hadn't figured out ‘til the end how we were going to do the drums. I'm surprised we ever got it finished, because the tape literally fell to pieces. It became clear from the intensity of working on a record like that, going over and over and over, blocking out backgrounds, changing arrangements, and all that. By the time it came to mixing, the tape was peeling off in 2-inch pieces. We were recording Pyromania on 24-track, and we spent a lot of months on that record. What kind of role did it play as you got near the end of tracking? The Fairlight seems like it basically became like another member of the band. It was pretty unnatural, but that was kind of the point. We experimented, EQ'd, and mangled the sound up a little bit to come up with the drum sound. The toms were primarily Simmons toms back then, which were electronic. When we were sampling in the sounds, we used KM 84s and we used 58s. We ended up with something that Mutt liked that we could detune a little bit. We sampled Black Beauty snares, other snares, and all kinds of bass drums.
We'd sample them in at half-speed, thinking that we'd get a better sound, because that's when Fairlight was at 8 bits – you had to get around that part of it. We had all kinds of drums in there, and I sampled them into the Fairlight and detuned them. The cymbals are played, but the bass drum, snare, and toms are all machine. Like all the other songs on the record, the song's drums were all samples from the Fairlight. It was on the cutting edge, but somehow we managed to put it all together.
Mutt definition how to#
We had to figure out how to sync that up. He would keep changing the arrangements, so therefore the drum parts would need to keep changing. On Pyromania Mutt wanted to be experimental and leave the drums to the very end. The previous Def Leppard record, High ‘n' Dry, was recorded with real drums. You and Mutt were trying something truly revolutionary, compared to the way rock drums were being recorded at that time. Shipley explains how he was the right-hand man to Mutt Lange, and how he helmed many mixes and albums on his own.įrom Pyromania to Hysteria to Paper Airplane by Jake Brown | Justin Cortelyou and Thomas Dolby interviews by Larry Crane To date, one can still shake their head thinking back about how cinematic and epic the record's sound was for the time. Rather than going the natural route, let's make something larger than life!'"įamed engineer/mixer Mike Shipley recalls the moment when legendary record producer Robert John "Mutt" Lange first expressed his vision for Def Leppard's 1983 album, Pyromania. They're all out watching Star Wars and having visual experiences, so let's make records like that. "Mutt's whole thing was, ‘Kids these days don't want to hear honky little snare drums. Unfortunately Mike Shipley passed away far too soon in 2013, but we are honored to present his final print interview from that year courtesy of our contributor Jake Brown.
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