Engineer Eddie Kramer

Interview Excerpt

From Rock icons such as Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Kiss, Traffic and The Kinks, to Pop stars Sammy Davis Jr. and Petula Clark, as well as the seminal Rock movie “Woodstock”, Eddie Kramer is clearly responsible for recording some of the most enjoyable and influential music ever made.

QUESTION: How did you get started in the recording business?

EDDIE KRAMER: I guess I really learned by watching what the other engineers did whilst they were recording, and I sort of adapted their technique in recording my first Jazz groups.  From there I went to Pye Studios and that’s really where I got my first lesson on how to record Pop music.  My mentor there was a guy named Bob Auger who was an absolute genius.  We used to go out on the road with the Pye Mobile recording 90 piece symphony orchestras on a 3 track Ampex machine.  We would use three Neumann U 47’s placed strategically Left, Center, Right for the balance.  The conductor would draw out from orchestra what was necessary so if you got the mic placement correct and you got the conductor to help you, then you would theoretically get a great recording.  I learned a lot from that situation.

Upon our return to Pye Studios we would record a band like The Kinks, on which I was an assistant, or we would record Petula Clark.  So there was a wide range of Pop and Classical stuff that I got to witness and be a part of.  This was all three track in the beginning and then it evolved into four track.

From there I started my own studio, KPS Sound Studio, which was a little demo “hole in the wall” where we recorded John Mayall and some of the Kinks.  It was a very basic, very primitive two track studio. 

Eventually I landed at Olympic where I met my next mentor, Keith Grant – who I owe a lot to. Keith was a monster at doing large sessions.  He’d do big orchestras with a choir, rhythm section, horns and lead vocal all at the same time. Olympic was the best independent studio in London, with a capacity of between 80 or 90 musicians, and it’s where I ended up doing Hendrix, Traffic, the Stones, you name it.

We’d do a lot of music to picture and just a tremendous variety of stuff.  For example, in the morning we’d do a movie soundtrack from about 9AM to 1PM, in the afternoon we’d do a jingle, then break it all down and record the Stones in the evening!  Many times the instruments that were left lying around from the orchestral sessions wound up getting used on the Rock sessions later at night.  The Rock guys would come in and say, “That’s cool.  I’m gonna use that”, which is how I recorded Jimi using the glockenspiel on Little Wing, because it was just left in the studio.

Having been trained as a Classical musician, then getting into Jazz, then into Rock, I had this very wide range of taste in music that was very eclectic.  So when anything weird came into the studio, I was the guy they picked.

That must have influenced your philosophy about recording.

In regards to mic techniques, what I adapted was this Classical idea of recording; i.e. the distance of the microphones to the instruments should not be too close if you wanted to get anything with tremendous depth.  Obviously I used close miking techniques as well, but it started with the concept that “Distance Makes Depth” that Bob Auger taught me.  Generally the basic philosophy of getting the mics up in the air and getting some room sound and some air around the instrument was what we used.  Then you’d fill in with the close mics.

Of the microphones that we used, 67’s were probably the favorite (and still are today), but we used 47’s, 251’s, a lot of KM 56’s and 54’s, ribbon mics, AKG D-12’s, D20’s and D30’s.  In fact, on some of the Hendrix stuff I used a D30 on the bass drum which I still think is a really great bass drum mic.

Once I came to the United States in ‘68, utilizing that philosophy seemed to work, but with some modifications.  Obviously watching how the American engineers did things influenced me to a certain extent.

How was that different?

It was different in that they didn’t use as many mics and they would be very tight in, which I though was a cool thing.  So I adapted that close-in technique of getting right in on the speaker cab which seemed to work very well.

Were you using a combination of close and far mics?

Yes I was.  In fact the Hendrix stuff in ’68 at the Record Plant, the Electric Ladyland album, if you listen to Voodoo Child, you can hear the way the room just resonates.  That’s because I had mics everywhere, and the fact that he was singing live too!  I wasn’t scared of recording an artist in the room live as he was cutting.  To me, anything that was in the room was fair game to be recorded.  Don’t forget that I had an artist who was an absolute genius so it made life a lot simpler.  When you’re recording someone of Hendrix’s ilk, you’re not going to be overdubbing much if it’s a live track.  You put the mics up, place them correctly, and give the artist the room and the facility to work in and make sure it sounds cool so when they walk into the control room they say, “Oh, that sounds just like I was playing it out there”.  That’s the goal.  To capture the essence of what the artist is actually doing in the studio.

Obviously there are other ways to do it.  You can do it in sections and pieces by overdubbing and recutting and that certainly works too, but to me there’s nothing more exciting that having the band in the studio cutting live straight to tape where that’s the performance and that’s what gets mixed.  That’s the essence of any great recording.  I don’t care if it’s Classical or Rock or Country, you’ve got to capture that performance and the hell with the bloody leakage.

So you mostly did multiple takes and then chopped together a good one?

Yeah, absolutely.  Chopping multitrack tape was the name of the day.  I think that a lot of producers and engineers that grew up in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s hold to that philosophy.  I think that even today with Protools one can still do that although it also can be slower in the long run.  I urge anyone that’s cutting tracks now not to record directly to Prootools.  Go to analog first.  Get a nice 16 track headblock, record at 15 IPS, put Dolby SR on if you desire, then transfer over to Protools.  But, I’m very, very careful about that transfer process.  The critical trick is to use the best converters that money can buy.  I’ve been using Myteks for the last two years now.  The other thing is to use a great master workclock.  I use the Rosendahl with the Mytek and by God, the stuff actually sounds pretty good.  Even after that, I love to lock up the original analog drum tracks with Protools for mixing.

When you started you were pretty limited by the number of tracks and channels available.

Definitely.  You have to use your imagination and think really hard about how to plan it out.  For instance, on Hendrix stuff which is the classic example, it was done on four track.  On the first record we used mono drums and mono guitars and so forth.  So on “Are You Experienced” we would fill a four track up then dump it down to another four track, leaving two tracks open, then you may have to do that again.  On “Axis: Bold As Love” I was doing stereo drums which made a big difference. 

So you’re EQing to tape?

I always do.  I have done my whole life.  If I hear a sound that I like then it goes to tape.  If it’s a guitar then I’ll print the reverb as well on a separate track so the sound is there and locked in.  I usually have an idea of what it’s going to sound like in the final analysis so the EQ and compression is done right then and there.  I think if you bugger around with it afterwards you have too many choices.  This isn’t rocket science, it’s music.  Just record the thing the way you hear it!  After all, it is the song that we’re trying to get and the guy’s emotion.  We’re becoming so anal and self-analytical and protracted with our views on recording, I think it’s destructive and anti-creative.  It’s bad enough that we have to be locked into a bloody room with sweaty musician (laughs). 

Recording music should be a fun filled day. To me, making a record should be about having a ball because it makes the day go quickly and yet your still getting what you want on tape.  There’s a friend of mine that has a bar in his studio and after the session is finished everybody has a beer and relaxes.  What a wonderful thing!  I think artists today have a tendency not to do this.  You cut to a bloody click track, go to Beat Detective, do a lot of overdubs in Protools and then spend a lot of time searching for the right plug-ins to make it sound cool.  But the track has to move and breathe.  Listen to all the great songs and albums that have been recorded the last 30 years.  The ones that really stand out are the ones that breathe and move.  With human beings, their tempo varies.  I do admire what can be done in Protools, but if there’s something that wrong, you should have done another take and maybe chop things together.

Didn’t you tell me once that “All Along The Watchtower” was take #27?

That’s a great example of an artist of Jimi’s stature starting from square one with a very difficult arrangement.  He’s yelling at Mitch, “C’mon.  Here’s how you do the rhythm part”.  Then Mitch eventually gets it.  Then he yells at Dave Mason because he can’t get the secondary rhythm guitar part.  Eventually he gets it and Jimi keeps going at it and going at it.  At one point Brian Jones walks into the studio drunk out of his mind and starts to play piano.  Jimi politely lets him play, I think on take 20 or 21, and then excuses him by saying “No, I don’t think so Brian”.  Then by take 25 it’s a 4 star, take 26 is good but take 27 is the master, you can just tell.  It’s got everything right.  Everything is perfectly placed and has the intensity that Jimi wanted.  So the song evolved because it had to.  There was no time for rehearsal.  This was something that had to be learned in the studio.  It’s not the way you want to do it, but because he’s a musician of that stature, you don’t mind if it takes 30 takes.

When you’re tracking now, do you still have everyone in the studio playing and going for keepers?

As much as I can I encourage bands to do that.  I go into preproduction making the band really understand what the parts are and what the options are.  You’ve got to know what the options are because when you go into the studio and start recording, even though you’re well rehearsed something might not work, so you’ve got to have a backup plan. Sometimes when you hear something in the studio it doesn’t sound the same as preproduction so you’ve got to be able to change things.  You may only end up with a great drum track and a great bass track and maybe the guitars have to be replaced, which is not a problem, but I at least try to get as much of it on tape to preserve that feel.

So before you weren’t worried about leakage.  Are you more worried about it now?

EDDIE KRAMER: It depends on the situation.  If the band is of the type that can execute perfectly and doesn’t require any replacement, you want to capture it with the leakage.  If you know that you’ll have to work on the parts and they might require a lot of attention to detail, you have to look at the leakage factor as being important.