Jimmy Page on EQ

bonzo75

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BRAD TOLINSKI: Right from the beginning, you were able to translate the extreme dynamism of Led Zeppelin’s live act into a dynamic studio recording: What was your secret?

JIMMY PAGE: That is interesting, isn’t it? One usually thinks of a dynamic album being translated into a dynamic live performance, but in the early days, it was the other way around for us.

I think part of the key was that we miked John Bonham’s drums like a proper acoustic instrument in a good acoustic environment. The drums had to sound good because they were going to be the backbone of the band. So I worked hard on microphone placement. But then again, you see, when you have someone who is as powerful as John Bonham going for you, the battle is all but won.

So the way to capture a dynamic performance is, essentially, to capture the natural sound of the instruments.

PAGE: Sure. You shouldn’t really have to use EQ in the studio if the instruments sound good. It should all be done with microphones and microphone placement. The instruments that bleed into each other are what creates the ambience. Once you start cleaning everything up, you lose it. You lose that sort of halo that bleeding creates. Then if you eliminate the halo, you have to go back and put in some artificial reverb, which is never as good.

PAGE: And that’s probably the biggest difference between the music made in the Fifties and music made from the Seventies on—everything suddenly had to be cleaned up. You do that and you take that whole punch out of the track.
 

jeff1225

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Thank you for sharing. I've seen a quote from him before stating that the secret to the great jazz recordings for the 50's and 60's was mic placement and he looked to emulate that with Zepplin.
 

853guy

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http://tapeop.com/interviews/109/glyn-johns/

Incidentally, it was Glyn John's "three-mic technique" for miking drums I liberally embraced for a while with two spaced condensers, one directly above the snare, the other facing over the floor tom toward the snare, measured to be equidistant from the snare's centre. With a kick mic placed back from the front head you could achieve an amazingly natural drum sound, provided of course the kit was tuned properly, the room was good, and the player was better. It's still its own "thing" and didn't work for every track, room or drummer, but when it did, it was awesome.

What the approach did do was set up a hierarchy for recording that in descending order of importance went:

Mic pre
Mic
Mic placement
Instrument
Instrument placement
Room
Player

Especially for drums, though most acoustic instruments benefitted from that.

As a side note, it was Glyn John's younger brother Andy who went on to engineer all of Led Zepplin's albums from II through to Physical Graffiti, and Glyn's son Ethan whose career has taken on its own trajectory in working with Ryan Adams, Kings of Leon, Ray LaMontagne, Laura Marling, et al. That some gene pool.
 
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Kingsrule

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Interesting....So why do all the Zepplin cd's sound bad?
 

853guy

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NorthStar

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Interesting....So why do all the Zepplin cd's sound bad?

Jimmy Page is an analog guy; 45s vinyl.
____

I agree with him that proper mic techniques is key to capture the essence, the good ambiance of the moment in its proper "sound" delivery.
When Jimmy listens to music @ home he likes his 45s.
______

Good stuff.
 

bonzo75

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Jimmy Page is an analog guy; 45s vinyl.
____

I agree with him that proper mic techniques is key to capture the essence, the good ambiance of the moment in its proper "sound" delivery.
When Jimmy listens to music @ home he likes his 45s.
______

Good stuff.

He should try listening to the Zep 45s at Mike's, he will realize how good they were.
 

ddk

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Interesting....So why do all the Zepplin cd's sound bad?

Not just Zepplin, I find most 70's rock unlistenable in digital I'm sure some of it has to do with already compromised tapes but so much of it comes from poor mastering to digital.

david
 

bonzo75

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Not just Zepplin, I find most 70's rock unlistenable in digital I'm sure some of it has to do with already compromised tapes but so much of it comes from poor mastering to digital.

david

Yeah I was expecting the reverse, thought rock would be fine on CD, but the vinyl quality difference is really huge.
 

NorthStar

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bonzo75 said:
He should try listening to the Zep 45s at Mike's, he will realize how good they were.

Mike would have to contact Jimmy Page and invite him over.
Or if Mike could score an invitation from Jimmy it would be a nice coup. Jimmy's listening music room is very humble, but full packed of vinyl, many many 45s (small format).
His turntable is also very modest. But, Jimmy's aura is what makes it all vibrates together. His smile and enthusiasm is highly addictive.






From the Music video documentary: It Might Get Loud ?






 
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NorthStar

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Not just Zepplin, I find most 70's rock unlistenable in digital I'm sure some of it has to do with already compromised tapes but so much of it comes from poor mastering to digital.

david

Yes David; when CD was invented it was for the portability, not for the quality. All my early CDs are awful sounding...Led Zeppelin, YES, King Crimson, The Doors, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, ...95% of them all. And all my LPs are much better sounding...no question about that...period!

Some of my favorites now have been replaced on DVD-Audio, SACD, Blu-ray Audio. And some with both Stereo and Multichannel.
Others are better remastered ones on CDs. But those are few.
Anyway over the years my music taste also changed; Blues, Jazz, Classical ... and from the better music record labels.
Some classic Rock music will always be impregnated permanently in my soul though; the reason why the music pursuit never ends because of the constant improvements in remastering them properly. Vinyl will always remain the safest bet; to the soul of the matter.

Audiophiles like Mike and others here @ WBF not only are in the search of the best sound delivery but most importantly of the best source...the music master tapes.
 

morricab

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Apr 25, 2014
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http://tapeop.com/interviews/109/glyn-johns/

Incidentally, it was Glyn John's "three-mic technique" for miking drums I liberally embraced for a while with two spaced condensers, one directly above the snare, the other facing over the floor tom toward the snare, measured to be equidistant from the snare's centre. With a kick mic placed back from the front head you could achieve an amazingly natural drum sound, provided of course the kit was tuned properly, the room was good, and the player was better. It's still its own "thing" and didn't work for every track, room or drummer, but when it did, it was awesome.

What the approach did do was set up a hierarchy for recording that in descending order of importance went:

Mic pre
Mic
Mic placement
Instrument
Instrument placement
Room
Player

Especially for drums, though most acoustic instruments benefitted from that.

As a side note, it was Glyn John's younger brother Andy who went on to engineer all of Led Zepplin's albums from II through to Physical Graffiti, and Glyn's son Ethan whose career has taken on its own trajectory in working with Ryan Adams, Kings of Leon, Ray LaMontagne, Laura Marling, et al. That some gene pool.

Interesting you put the mic pre lady because there was a paper published in the mid 70s where a couple of recording engineers were concerned about so many studios sounding bad and the found the one common denominator was the switch from tubes to transistor mic pres. specifically opamps and they found that the overload headroom was very small compared to a tube mic pre and even inside the overload range the sound was lacking dynamics and punch.

They surmised that the most important electronics were the ones interfaced with a transducer (so also phono pre) and steps up the transducers signal.

Very interesting paper but doesn't really fit with your hierarchy.
 

Bruce B

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Here is a drum set up in my room for recording. Was pretty amazing how the engineer spent the better part of a day just setting up the mics and trying out different mic pre's. Too bad I don't do that anymore.... was pretty interesting. Learned a lot!!!


Drums.jpg
 

853guy

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Interesting you put the mic pre lady because there was a paper published in the mid 70s where a couple of recording engineers were concerned about so many studios sounding bad and the found the one common denominator was the switch from tubes to transistor mic pres. specifically opamps and they found that the overload headroom was very small compared to a tube mic pre and even inside the overload range the sound was lacking dynamics and punch.

They surmised that the most important electronics were the ones interfaced with a transducer (so also phono pre) and steps up the transducers signal.

Very interesting paper but doesn't really fit with your hierarchy.

Hey Morricab,

Me? I'm not really one for Platonic idealism.

As you well know, audio engineering is part science, part art and part luck. You do what you can within your control and the rest is up to the gods (i.e. talent).

And yes, the reality is there are plenty of mic pres that would only ever be used in a studio of mine as doorstops, but not all of them would be solid state. It’s like anything - there’s good and bad examples of everything, not limited to mic pres and phono pres, but some things have moved on since the 70’s (thankfully). Like artisanal and specialist hi-fi, there’s literally hundreds of small manufacturers producing mic pres in all sorts of flavours, so while you can make some broad generalisations, that’s all they really are. The whole point of choosing a mic pre is usually to achieve a very specific sonic goal, of which the match with mic is always decided in consideration with the source being miked.

Were I to build a studio from scratch again there’d be mic pres based around the Telefunken EF804s loaded with Lundahls for 70dB of clean gain; Neve 1073-style Class A with 1% metal film resistors and Vishay potentiometers; pres featuring switchable steel, nickel and discrete output transformers; and pres based around a balanced push-pull double triode circuit - all different, all for different applications, all with different sonic signatures for matching with different mics. As a non-purist, I appreciate variety, much like I do bikes made from steel, titanium and carbon, and wines made in Burgandy and Alsace. I like Coltrane and Sun Ra and The Mars Volta and Messiaen. Heck, I like digital and vinyl and even have a soft spot for cassette.

But even if I did assemble the above mic pres for my idealised studio, they still wouldn’t make up for improper mic selection or placement and none of them could possibly make up for an inferior ill-prepared instrument. Choosing those things is partly the responsibility of the engineer - no technology, no matter how sophisticated can make up for the dork setting them up wrong. And when it comes to who the musician is and how they play and make music, well, nothing makes up for that.

Best,

853guy

P.S. I'm guessing, but I imagine the two engineers who wrote the paper went on to have careers in which they were endlessly infuriated that lesser engineers using overloaded op-amp based pres still made massive records with talent who cared much less about the sonics, and much more about the song craft and performances. Just sayin'.
 

853guy

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Aug 14, 2013
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Cool picture Bruce. I count nine microphones.

Really? I count eight.

The Sm57 on the low stand on the right isn't plugged in.
 

Bruce B

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Really? I count eight.

The Sm57 on the low stand on the right isn't plugged in.

I think he spent about 30min on deciding whether he liked the 57 under the snare, out of phase.

There were 2 more room mics out of the picture....
 

ddk

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May 18, 2013
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Yes David; when CD was invented it was for the portability, not for the quality. All my early CDs are awful sounding...Led Zeppelin, YES, King Crimson, The Doors, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, ...95% of them all. And all my LPs are much better sounding...no question about that...period!

Some of my favorites now have been replaced on DVD-Audio, SACD, Blu-ray Audio. And some with both Stereo and Multichannel.
Others are better remastered ones on CDs. But those are few.
Anyway over the years my music taste also changed; Blues, Jazz, Classical ... and from the better music record labels.
Some classic Rock music will always be impregnated permanently in my soul though; the reason why the music pursuit never ends because of the constant improvements in remastering them properly. Vinyl will always remain the safest bet; to the soul of the matter.

Audiophiles like Mike and others here @ WBF not only are in the search of the best sound delivery but most importantly of the best source...the music master tapes.

On the other many early Jazz migrations to CD sound excellent and much better than their later 16 & 24bit reissues, so go figure. I'm not looking for the best just happy with listenable :)!

david
 

caesar

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May 30, 2010
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Because all CD's sound bad of course. My Classic Records, original British Pressings sound amazing.

The Japanese SHM CDs sound pretty amazing. The drum work is pretty phenomenonal. I happen to enjoy those more than original LPs or the 96/24 remasters - much more of the "surreal effect" of a human hitting those drums.
 

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