SH Spotlight Fleetwood Mac "Rumours" 45 & 33 1/3 RPM Hoffman/Gray vinyl mastering & equalization notes..

The 33 version rocks too!

 

Thanks Fashionboy and ssmith3046! I know the 45 would sound a little better, but the 33 might be fine for me.

 

Question for Steve: WHY would the EU version NOT use the same version that is sold in the States? Seems weird to have TWO different versions made from different mastering (what would the benefit be to do this - it certainly would cost more to pay for two different mastering jobs). WB could have pressed MORE at Pallas (which is in Germany, right??) and gotten the units cheaper (but again, this is the company that let Wilco go and resigned them for more money...).

 

Because the managers there are thumb?

 

True Chriss!

Well I am happy to report that after trying to get this title the third time was the trick. I have a legit 45 pressing in my collection. Now the perplexing thought enters my mind: should I leave this sealed and buy the 33 version to listen to?

I am also still perplexed as to why there are two different masterings available. Does WB have to release different versions in EU than in the States? Was the EU version an after thought? Were plates sent to Pallas or were they given the lacquers? Would the plates not fit on the EU plant ( and which plant pressed the other pressing)?

I am also surprised that WB uses Pallas and not RTI - when I am sure that Steve and Kevin cut the lacquers at AcousTech? Does WB have a contract now with Pallas or was RTI not available?

 

The legit 45 is identified how?

 

The easiest way is look for a "Made In The U.S.A" on the back right bottom corner. The Euro, non Hoffman/Gray 45 has a "Made In The EU" on the back. There are other distinguishing factors as well that you'll find if you do a search in this thread:

http://www.stevehoffman.tv/forums/showthread.php?t=112214

 

YES!

 

And it gets better.


Classic Tracks: Fleetwood Mac "Go Your Own Way"

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/aug07/articles/classictracks_0807.htm


In 1976, in the face of deteriorating personal relationships
and massive record company pressure, Fleetwood Mac
managed to create a record that would go on to sell 30
million copies.

____________________________________________________________



Richard Buskin


John Lennon said it: "Genius is pain." And indeed, if an artist's personal misery often lends itself to creative achievement, then the mid-'70s incarnation of Fleetwood Mac was not only a case in point, but actually a multiple helping. You see, by 1976 not only was the marriage of bass player John McVie and keyboardist Christine at an end, but so was that of drummer Mick Fleetwood and spouse Jenny Boyd (sister of George Harrison's former wife, Pattie Boyd), while the long-time relationship between guitarist Lindsey Buckingham and singer Stevie Nicks had also reached breaking point. Since all of this just happened to coincide with the mainstream triumph of the eponymous 1975 album that spawned the hit singles 'Over My Head', 'Say You Love Me' and 'Rhiannon', and the record company was telling them that superstar status was now theirs for the taking, the band members had little choice but to stick it out and record a follow-up.

Which is precisely what they did, drawing on internal tensions (fuelled by copious amounts of drugs and alcohol) to produce the band's magnum opus, Rumours. The recipient of a Grammy Award as 1977's Album of the Year, as well as a diamond certification by the RIAA for sales that, by 2003, would top 19 million in the US alone (and more than 30 million worldwide), the record sat at number one on the Billboard charts for over six months and included hit singles such as Buckingham's 'Go Your Own Way', Nicks' 'Dreams' and Christine McVie's 'Don't Stop' and 'You Make Loving Fun', as well as other popular tracks like Nicks' 'Gold Dust Woman' and all five members' 'The Chain'.

Still, it's 'Go Your Own Way', the first single released off the album — and the only Fleetwood Mac number to have made the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame's list of '500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll' — that has proved to be the most enduring. And it's also the one that best encapsulates what Rumours was all about, with Lindsey charmingly informing Stevie that "Loving you isn't the right thing to do," and "Packing up, shacking up is all you wanna do," (a line he refused to take out despite her objections). Little wonder that she joined him enthusiastically to sing "You can go your own way" on the chorus.

"I very much resented him telling the world that 'packing up, shacking up' with different men was all I wanted to do," Nicks later told Rolling Stone. "He knew it wasn't true. It was just an angry thing that he said. Every time those words would come onstage, I wanted to go over and kill him. He knew it, so he really pushed my buttons through that. It was like, 'I'll make you suffer for leaving me.' And I did."

Then again, as Nicks also acknowledged during an episode of VH1's Behind The Music, "Devastation leads to writing good things." And no doubt about it, 'Go Your Own Way' is a really good thing, boasting a beautiful pop melody, exquisite vocal harmonies, a dynamic chorus and Buckingham's scintillating guitar solo.

Pot Luck​

Ken Caillat is a native of Northern California who relocated to Los Angeles during the early '70s and landed a job at Wally Heider Recording. There he assisted producer/engineer Bones Howe on numerous sessions, recorded Joni Mitchell's live album and tracked the strings on Paul McCartney & Wings' Venus & Mars, prior to hooking up with Fleetwood Mac.

This came about by way of Richard Dashut, a former housemate of Buckingham and Nicks who'd assistant-engineered their album and then became Mac's live mixer when the duo joined the band in 1975. Popping into Wally Heider's to remix a show for radio broadcast, Dashut sat alongside Caillat behind the console and struck up a fast friendship when the latter asked if he smoked weed and would like to get high.

"We put the tapes aside for a few minutes, smoked a joint and spent most of the night mixing tapes," Dashut would later recall. "The band liked the job and they liked Ken, I liked Ken, everybody liked Ken."

Caillat himself remembers: "It was a Saturday, and Mick said, 'Jeez, Ken, we really like you and we wish we had met you sooner because tomorrow we're gonna work with this guy named Kelly Kotera over at the Record Plant. We've hired him to record our next album up in Sausalito.' Anyway, they took off to remix 'Rhiannon', which was the next single, and then I got a call Monday morning saying it didn't work, everything was off with Kelly, and could I do the mix?"

The mix was done that afternoon, everybody loved it, and the result was that when Dashut was unexpectedly asked to helm the Rumours project, he asked Caillat to collaborate.

"Mick gave me and Ken each an old Chinese I-Ching coin and said, 'Good luck,'" Dashut recalled.

As it turned out, the more technically adept Caillat did most of the engineering, while the production chores were shared.

"At first, I was only going to engineer," Caillat says. "However, the group's attitude was, 'Hey, you can't sit in there and just turn knobs, kid. You've got to tell us what's going on. You need to be our eyes and ears.' After we'd done a couple of takes, I was asked which one I liked best. I was looking at them like, 'Well, why don't you just come in and listen?' The fact was, they didn't want to come in. They wanted input from the control room. So, when they then asked if I liked one bass part more than another bass part, I spoke up, and it was the same with Richard. He and I quickly figured out this wasn't going to be just a 'sit back and turn the knobs' gig. We'd have to pay attention and maybe take notes once in a while, and soon we were telling them, 'Hey, that was a great take. We really like that second take more.' It was kinda like Producing 101.

"Although Richard turned some knobs, he didn't like to do that as much. I remember one time, Lindsey literally screamed at me: 'Goddamn it, Ken! Would you let him do some engineering?' I was like, 'Well, I'm not stopping him!' Richard's a personable guy, and he did more of the talking. He was the one who cracked the jokes. And that was fine. I liked to turn the knobs. You see, the real turmoil on that album only took place at the start of the sessions and it probably lasted two or three weeks. That was down to not only the relationship issues but also the pressure to deliver.

Pressure​

"I remember one day they got a call from the record company telling them how important the next album would be. We had been recording songs and getting some nice basic tracks, and suddenly their level of interest changed — 'Let me hear that bass part again. Solo it up for me.' 'Why? We've already been high-fiving one another. It's great.' 'Just solo it up.' They all got very interested in reviewing their parts, so things kinda got a little more serious that way, and this was right about the same time that Mick's wife left him. I remember him walking into the control room as white as a ghost, and of course everyone rallied around him, but then there was John and Christine's break-up. She'd sneak her new boyfriend into the studio just as John was walking out through another door, and we were kinda ducking — 'When are the two chemicals going to mix? When are we going to have the explosion?'

"Whereas Mick didn't have any say in what was happening — his wife wanted out — and John and Christine's relationship had degraded to the point where she was already seeing somebody else, Lindsey and Stevie were still in the fighting stage. I remember them singing background vocals to 'You Make Loving Fun', sitting on two stools in front of a pair of microphones, directly facing me on the other side of the control room glass, and if we had to stop tape for whatever reason, during the few seconds that it was being rewound they'd be shouting and screaming at one another. I'd be thinking, 'Go tape, go tape, hurry, hurry, let's hit play!' It was painful, especially as the guys were all living at this Record Plant house, but thankfully by the time we got back to LA, and everybody was sleeping in his or her own bed, it was just a case of getting together to work every day. In fact, it was pretty harmonious compared to other sessions I'd do later on."

This often revolved around recording new parts once the basic backing tracks had all been completed.

"Lindsey might walk in the room and say, 'I've been thinking; I've got a great idea for a guitar solo on 'Go Your Own Way',' and so we'd work on that and put it down," Caillat explains. "Or Stevie might say she had an idea for a background vocal and we'd work on that. It felt nice and fresh because we kept rotating everything. You see, I really think the whole topic of drugs on those sessions has been overplayed. Yeah, that stuff was around, but it wasn't like everybody was crawling all over one another, and I don't think it got in the way of the music-making. It was more a case of 'Hey, we're all getting kind of tired. Maybe we should get some coke.' Someone had introduced them to it, they had liked it, and what with us getting weary as the weeks went on, it was seen as a pick-me up — 'Oh man, I'm beat, I don't know if I can get up and go today.'

"We worked 14- or 15-hour days, and I always tried to start the session at the same time every day but could never do it. Fourteen to 15 hours didn't leave enough time, so every day we pushed back another two or three hours. You know, 'It's two in the morning, but let's try to start at noon tomorrow.' Then, by the time we'd get home and go to sleep, we couldn't make it. We were always trying to push ourselves to get in at a decent time, but eventually we were starting at 10 o'clock at night and finally we said, 'OK, this is crazy.' One Saturday we worked until four in the morning, so we took Sunday off, slept most of the day, and started again first thing Monday morning. However, we felt like we weren't getting enough done and that we couldn't keep taking days off, so the coke seemed like a good solution. Today that wouldn't be the case; I would just say, 'We're taking Saturday and Sunday off, everybody have a good night's sleep, have a good time, and we'll see you bright and early Monday morning.' It seems so simple, but back then it felt like we were all in it together, working 'til we dropped."

Troubleshooting In Sausalito​

Rumours was recorded between February and August 1977, and the first two months were spent at the Record Plant in Sausalito, mainly so that the band members could temporarily escape the attention of attorneys and record company execs while laying the foundations for their new album. For his part, Ken Caillat took a leave of absence from Wally Heider's, promising that he'd attempt to have Fleetwood Mac record there once they felt comfortable about returning to LA. And he succeeded (more of which later).

"It was a Tom Hidley room, a very dead room, and I didn't like the sound in there," Caillat says about the Record Plant's Sausalito facility. "It had very dead speakers and a lot of padding — you'd walk into the control room and it was so still that you'd almost hurt your ears. There was a 3M 24-track machine, great mics, an API console with 550A equalisers, and a medium-sized live room; about 30 by 20 feet."

The fact that Caillat was used to working on API desks at Wally Heider Recording made for a smooth transition up in Sausalito, yet it didn't prevent him and Dashut from initially running into an extended period of big-time sonic trouble.

"Richard and I nearly got fired," he reveals. "I think it took us about eight or nine days before we could get a sound that was good. Everything sounded like a miniature person was playing these miniature instruments, and we were just pulling our hair out. I'm sure Fleetwood Mac were going, 'What the hell did we do? We only tried out this guy Caillat on one mix. He certainly can't engineer.' Richard and I tried everything to make the sound bigger. We even taped two kick drums together out of frustration, trying to get some size and some beat out of them, but nothing would work, and finally I got pissed off. I said, 'Goddamn it, what the hell's going on here,' and I literally just started turning knobs, and within about five minutes of doing this on a track we were trying to cut, it was sounding great.

"Basically, I remembered that the APIs like the preamp to be opened up more, so I would bring the fader down as low as possible and crank up the input gain, and it seemed like that opened up the sound; that and +12 on every EQ channel. Once I did that, I started twisting knobs, and boom-boom-boom, it worked. The band walked in after we'd recorded this one song and they were like, 'Wow, so what was the last eight days all about? It just took you guys 10 minutes to get a killer sound.'"

Looking through the control-room window at the rectangular-shaped live area that ran lengthwise from left to right, Ken Caillat could see a drum area at the right side, with wood on the floor as well as on the wall that was to the rear of the kit. Baffles were placed around Mick Fleetwood, and also around John McVie, who stood facing his own amp as well as the drummer, while Lindsey Buckingham was positioned behind the bass player — or to the left of him from Caillat's viewpoint — and Christine McVie's keyboards were close to the window, somewhat isolated from the drums.

"We'd put an amp in one room, put another amp in another room, and have another room with a Leslie preamp mic'd up," Caillat explains. "I liked to set the monitor mix and the headphone mix as close as possible to what I thought the record would sound like, including whatever effects would be on there. And because we wanted to have enough flexibility for songs having different effects, I always had two or three mics on a guitar amp — I could put one out of phase, slide the others back and forth to change the sound, and I'd do the same with the bass. With a Leslie on a send, if I needed to send an electric guitar through the Leslie, I'd just bring that fader up."

Frequencies​

While the songwriting and performances were obviously central to the album's success, the production and engineering cannot be discounted. And this is particularly true with regard to how the instruments not only blend together but also retain their own space, courtesy of Dashut and Caillat ensuring that each was allotted its own place within the frequency spectrum.

"We had a lot of time to dial everything in, and the band members were incredibly tolerant," Caillat says. "But then again, if you think about how we started, with them asking us to be their ears, that was just a natural progression. When we were recording Rumours, Christine would ask, 'How does everything sound, Ken? Did you like this take better than that take?' and sometimes I'd say, 'Y'know, Chris, I'm having trouble hearing the keyboard and the guitar.' The first time I said that, I didn't really know what I meant, but she said, 'Oh... Yeah, you're right, Ken. We're playing in the same register. Why don't I invert the keyboard down a third and get out of Lindsey's way?' Which is what she did and it worked brilliantly. After that I'd go, 'Hey, you know, you two guys are playing in the same spot. One of you should go up or down, so let's figure out who's going to take which frequency.'"

The prime example of Rumours' excellence in terms of composition, arrangement, performance and sonic clarity was 'Go Your Own Way', whose complex drums originated in a discussion between Richard Dashut and Lindsey Buckingham that Ken Caillat overheard while driving them to the Sausalito studio one morning. In short, the two men agreed that they loved Charlie Watts' drum pattern on The Rolling Stones' 'Street Fighting Man', and Buckingham asserted that he'd love to hear Mick Fleetwood play something similar.

"We knew we were going to record 'Go Your Own Way', and so when we got to the studio Lindsey cut the track with an acoustic guitar," Caillat recalls. "Then he asked Mick to play these drums that had the big tom fills, and although Mick couldn't quite get it, he 'Fleetwoodized' it, doing the best that he could to duplicate the Stones track. John played along on bass, and after that we built the song with Lindsey's guitar and Christine's organ. In fact, before we left Sausalito I did rough mixes of every song, and that tape was very similar to the final version of Rumours, just without all the little frosting and bells and whistles, including the solos."

Tape Decay​

With everything in good shape, about four months were spent at Wally Heider Recording, adding most of Buckingham's guitar colours and harmonics, with Fleetwood and John McVie in attendance, while the women took a break, before returning toward the end for some vocal work.

"Doing the backing vocals was always great," Caillat remarks. "Lindsey, Stevie and Christine would sit around a piano, and Lindsey would really orchestrate what was going on — 'You're going to sing these notes. Here's how they sound on the piano...' All of the parts were just genius, I think. Still, it was also at Heider's that we almost lost the album, due to the tape wearing out. We listened to everything loud, and I started saying, 'Are my ears going or does this sound duller than usual? It seems like I'm adding more top end all the time.' Eventually I turned to the second engineer and asked him to clean the heads, and when he did this I noticed there was a lot of shedding going on. Every pass we had to stop and clean the heads, but still we pushed on, trying to get the work done, until finally I said, 'Maybe there's a bigger problem here. Maybe we're doing damage.'

"At one point I even brought up the kick drum and the snare, solo'd them, went back and forth between the two, and asked anybody if they could pick out which was which, and without any other timing information or instrumentation you couldn't tell the difference between them. So much character was gone from the kick and the snare that they just sounded like 'pah, pah'. That's when the fog cleared from our brains and we knew we had a problem. The fact was, the tapes were just worn out. They had been played so much, and that Ampex tape also had a problem that we wouldn't find out about until later, but coincidentally we had a backup.

"Back at the Sausalito Record Plant, when Richard and I had been trying to get our act together and get the sound to come out of the console, the guys there told us that, with two 24-track machines in each room, their usual procedure was to run both on the backing tracks. Well, I didn't care, so I said, 'Sure'. I've never done that at any other time, but in this case we ran two 24-track recorders for all the basic tracks, so when we now couldn't tell the difference between the kick drum and the snare I remembered that we had these simultaneous first-generation masters. I said, 'There is a solution, guys. We could possibly transfer all of the overdubs back to the other tape and use the new drums.' They said, 'You can do that?' and I said, 'I think so.' They said, 'Well, let's do it!' Of course, back then we didn't have any time code, so we didn't have any way to sync the tapes up, and I therefore called around and found a real technical guy at ABC Dunhill who thought he could do it. We went there and put the tapes up, and we manually transferred them side by side.

"Tape machines will never run at the same speed twice, so this guy put a pair of headphones on, and he put the hi-hat and snare from the original tape in his left ear, and the hi-hat and snare from the safety master in his right ear, and we kept marking the tape and hitting 'start' on both machines at the same time until it was close enough at the beginning, and then he would use the VSO [vari-speed oscillator] on one of the machines, carefully adjusting the speed slightly and basically playing it like an instrument, keeping the two kick drums and snare drums in the centre of his head. If he put his headphones in the right direction, as one machine moved faster than the other, the image in his head would move to the right. So he would turn the VSO to the left, and basically it was like steering it. I tried that a couple of times and it nearly scrambled my brain, but he did that all night long and saved our butts. Rumours would have been dead, just about. What a coincidence that we'd just happened to record double basic tracks."

Playing The Guitar Player​

Drama, drama, drama. Fortunately, the tapes were now in sparkling condition, yet things didn't exactly calm down following the completion of work at Wally Heider's. Thereafter, more vocals were recorded at both Sound City and the Record Plant in LA, the band performed several live gigs, and during a week off in Florida there were sessions at Miami's Criteria Studios, prior to the main mix taking place on a custom-built, transformerless board at Producers Workshop on Hollywood Boulevard. And still tensions were running high.

"We were at Criteria, Lindsey was working on guitar parts for 'Go Your Own Way', and at one point, having previously been warned that we only had one track left, he filled that with another part and then wanted to redo something," recalls Caillat. "I told him, 'We've just used the last track, so which one of the four takes that we've just done do you want to go over? Otherwise, we'll have to stop and comp it.' 'No, no, get rid of the last one,' he said. So, I went ahead and recorded again, and then he said, 'Play the last one.' I said, 'You told me to erase it.' Well, he put his guitar down, ran into the control room where I was sitting in a chair, and put both hands around my neck, shaking me like he was trying to strangle me. I said, 'Uh, excuse me?' and stood up, and he said, 'Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.' Everybody said, 'What are you doing? You told him to get rid of that track!' But that's how wound-up he was."

Sanity prevailed, and a good job, too, for it was at Criteria that Buckingham's stellar 'Go Your Own Way' guitar solo was ingeniously assembled from numerous takes by none other than Ken Caillat.

"By being able to stay in the moment and recall what was on tape, I knew every little lick that I liked on every track," he explains. "I'd have different lead-guitar takes on five or six faders, and I knew that this fader had this really good lick, so I'd bring it up and everybody would go, 'Hey, I love that lick, so don't forget it.' Then I'd bring up another one and they'd go, 'Oh, that's good too.' There were about six takes of lead guitar throughout the end section, and I basically started bringing up one fader and keeping it as long as I could, until it wasn't good any more, and then I'd bring up another fader and use that until I switched to another one, and so on.

"It was a completely comp'd solo, and on the 24-track it's still in its original form, with all the separate guitars, and you still have to mix that way. I remember, I'd gone away for Christmas vacation and got snowed in at Lake Tahoe, and when I finally returned I got a midnight call telling me to come to the studio because they'd been trying to mix that song and couldn't build the guitar solo. So I drove there and did the solo, using mutes and faders while also having two solos play simultaneously for certain parts, such as one toward the end where he does this slide.

"Obviously, I couldn't have done it without Lindsey, who played the parts in the first place and then had to learn that solo in order to play it live. And I also couldn't have done it that way in Pro Tools. I was literally playing the console like a musical instrument. With Pro Tools there's no instrument to play. It's all about faders on the screen, whereas I want faders on the board that I can touch and move. Pro Tools is intellectual — 'Let's bring that up by one-and-a-half dB,' — instead of being able to push the thing up and feel it. I mean, it may have been kind of cheesy that I was performing with this other guy's performance, but it was fun."

Published in SOS August 2007

 

Excellent article on the recording of the album. Thanks for posting it.

This part about the back up 24 track machine amazes me...

"Tape machines will never run at the same speed twice, so this guy put a pair of headphones on, and he put the hi-hat and snare from the original tape in his left ear, and the hi-hat and snare from the safety master in his right ear, and we kept marking the tape and hitting 'start' on both machines at the same time until it was close enough at the beginning, and then he would use the VSO [vari-speed oscillator] on one of the machines, carefully adjusting the speed slightly and basically playing it like an instrument, keeping the two kick drums and snare drums in the centre of his head. If he put his headphones in the right direction, as one machine moved faster than the other, the image in his head would move to the right. So he would turn the VSO to the left, and basically it was like steering it. I tried that a couple of times and it nearly scrambled my brain, but he did that all night long and saved our butts. Rumours would have been dead, just about. What a coincidence that we'd just happened to record double basic tracks."

 

Thanks for posting that Pig Whisperer.

 

Fleetwood Mac used a lot the Senheisser MD441. a round sound mic and less bright than than the average condensor-mic

 

I have what's supposed to be a WG Target (the first one from here: http://www.targetcd.com/rumoursw.html), however, the intro to GDW is the same as the 3rd clip you posted, the 32XD. Now I'm confused...

 

The first one on that page is the "04 target" (does your CD's matrix end in "04"?), which does have the same mastering as the 32XD.

But in any event, you'll notice I said that GDW fades up on all targets.

Steve, you were going to listen to those samples (on your cheapo computer speakers) and comment. I'm curious which you prefer. I'm sure you will find the exercise fascinating and well worth your time.

 

Yes, mine is the 04 matrix. That explains it.

 

Im only 6 years late, BUT I FINALLY FOUND A SEINFELD REFERENCE ON SHF!

 

Question: when you play your work of long ago, do you sit there constantly thinking about the moves you made, or are you able to simply enjoy the recording and its beauty?

 

I had a client who used to constantly tell me to massage his demos. Maybe that's what he meant.

 

Temendous thread. Wow. I'm Very late to the party. Steve, what's your take on the Nautilus version of Rumours? I own a few Nautilus' releases and they are stellar.

I've owned this 45rpm version of Steve's for a few years and didn't appreciate the efforts until now.

Oh..one more thing. I thought I read here that Steve and Kevin's name were on the mastering on the LP but don't see it on my copies.

 

It's been a while, but, if I recall correctly, there was one concurrent vinyl release of "Rumours" from Europe that wasn't done by Steve and Kevin. One has to be real careful of what they are buying.

 

True. I actually read a review that said Steve and Kevin were not credited on the US version but did the mastering.

 

I recall reading somewhere recently that Rumours is one of the staple releases of the vinyl revival selling at a steady pace. I bought my copy of Steve's and Kevin's release as soon as I could get it, but I wonder if the presses in North America are still using their version or moved on to something else. I also have the European version that was released at the same time since amazon.ca sent it to me by mistake and although it's actually a better physical pressing, it's incredibly lifeless.