Level wrote on Tue, 01 February 2005 18:09 |
Now, who had the bright idea of putting those new drums in LaGrange/Bus/Chicago for the remixes? I think they suck actually. Not a good decision and I still wonder (besides the kick making the hat a shade blurry on original from console overload or cutter clipping, one of the two or both) why this was done?
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Wow, this is a really sticky subject with me. I have been VERY upset for many years about this.
When Warner contemplated re-releasing several (6) ZZ albums in a CD "Six Pack"I was asked by a party to remain nameless to remix several of the older albums. This was because they had only been released previously on vinyl, and since this was to be for COMPACT DISK (!) they obviously would have to be remixed FOR DIGITAL use! I explained that the original mixes were just fine, and that a CD remastering by an excellent engineer (Bob Ludwig and I had done the mastering, at Masterdisk, of almost all of the original vinyl releases, so I thought Bob just MIGHT be an OK guy to do it!) was all that was required. But no, they just had to be remixed FOR DIGITAL (don't forget all the consumer equipment, especially headphones, which was already then being labeled "Digital Ready!")
So I was ready to relent when I was told that they had budgeted one to three whole DAYS to remix the five albums (they had decided that Eliminator wouldn't need remixing since it had been on COMPACT DISK already!) I explained that you couldn't possibly properly remix five albums in such a short time; they said that was what it would be. So I refused to do it. I wouldn't be a part of such a ridiculous scheme ruining music that I loved.
So they got someone else to do the mixes. That person got a WENDEL (that awesome sample machine [sarcasm here if you didn't notice]) and had EVERY SNARE AND BASS DRUM BEAT bash away with the same samples, same non-dynamic levels, all through all of the songs!!! They also didn't make several of the edits which I had made by extending fade outs with repeated sections (with different guitar lead bits for variation), etc. When Ludwig got the mixes for mastering, he called me, aghast. He couldn't believe it either! I had to instruct him on how to TRY to recreate the edits with "similar" bits of the song (but no gtr variations). He HATED the mixes and begged me to find some way to intervene. But few music executive(s) have either ears or taste (those of you who DO, know who you are; I'm obviously not talking about YOU!), so these atrocious, mutilated mixes WERE RELEASED, and have been almost ALL that was available of those classic ZZ albums on CD all this time. Finally, last year WB released a new box set using many of the original mixes, mastered properly for CD.
Whew...you shouldn't have gotten me started on THAT ONE!!!
Anyway, thanks for the interest.
TM