Renown Music Engineer Mike Fraser Talks About Working With AC/DC, COVERDALE/PAGE
March 22, 2009, 15 years ago
Renown music engineer Mike Fraser (LED ZEPPELIN, METALLICA, AEROSMITH, VAN HALEN, MOTLEY CRÜE) spoke with Stuart Derdeyn from Theprovince.com recently about a number of topics including working with AC/DC on their current album, Black Ice. An excerpt from the interview follows:
Working on Black Ice was an old-school joy for Fraser because AC/DC is a band that comes into a studio "knowing exactly what they want."
"They don't think in terms of it needing to be huge because they haven't put out something in awhile. They come in with a bunch of songs they've been working on and we record them pretty much live off of the floor."And if they have songs that don't make the cut, album to album, they don't ever re-surface again later. If it isn't good enough for the record, it's gone."
The band hadn't rehearsed together in four years since the SARS concert in Toronto. Logically, expectations among studio staff were that it might take awhile to get back into the swing. Not so.
"Nope, they came in, plugged in and were off. We really had to be ready to go on the spot because they aren't one of those 'let's do this or that again' kind of groups. They just run through to find the highest level of energy and that's the one they keep."He captures it as true to form as possible. Impressive for a fellow who was the only one of his siblings to never take piano lessons and who only played in singerless rec-room rocker combos in high school that never saw the light of day. Back then, BLACK SABBATH, ALICE COOPER, Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin were his fave bands. At this point in his career, there are few of them he hasn't worked with. Along the way, he's learned plenty.
"One of my favourite lessons in knowing when to leave it alone happened in Miami working on the COVERDALE/PAGE album. One of the songs we recorded had maybe four or five tracks of acoustic guitars and, they weren't very tight. So I recorded them onto another tape and spent about three or four more hours to fix them. The next morning, Jimmy Page came in, had a listen, asked me, 'What the fuck happened to the guitars?' and I told him I fixed them. He said, 'Fix them back.'"Read the entire interview here.
