THE DARK LORD STUDIO <
rkside and Judas Priest. Rob Hughes talks to the man...
What part/s of the recording process do you really think you excel at? What is your speciality?
My favourite part is when we get into overdubs, after the initial backing track, and starting on guitars, vocals, keyboards and trying to make the basic riff of a song into something that will keep people interested when they hear it. They’re not going to have the band at full pelt in front of them and they’re not going to have the atmosphere of a gig, so I think it’s important to try and come up with guitar harmonies, melody lines on keyboards, pads or whatever it takes to make that song come alive when you put it into your player. I like to think that people will hear something different in it every time they listen to it. Also, I must say that, these days, I like the mixing process, too. I used to dread it before because it takes you a while to realise when things are not going to get any better. There’s only so much you can do and only so much time you’ve got to do it. Once I’d started relaxing, I found it a lot easier and there was much less revisiting the mix to try and maybe ‘juice’ this up, or take that down and so on. I still mix on an analog desk and do it the old school way.
There have been some significant changes to the way the industry works. How have you dealt with this? I have been very fortunate insomuch as being able to set my own places up and coming here [Tsangarides’ current studio, The Ecology Rooms] has been absolutely brilliant. There are not so many big acts that one works with these days, because
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people don’t want to throw money at the types of music I’m known for, such as heavy metal. But I have a reputation for the work that I’ve done, so I’m lucky enough to get people who want me to produce an album with them and often the budgets are not huge. But this is how my first studio, The Dump, started. People didn’t have enough money to pay both the studio and me as well – either I would get paid or the studio would. I saw the writing on the wall years ago. It was with Gary Moore actually that we started all this. He wanted to make an album in a rehearsal room at Music Bank in London, which was called Back to the Blues in the end. And he asked me: ‘Do you think we could do it there?’ so I said: ‘Well, yeah, but we need some gear’. So the long and short of it was that we got the TLA VTC desk and a Radar recorder and off we went. And when the album was done, I thought: ‘Well, I’ve got this mixer now and a recording machine, a slew of outboard and mics that I’d collected over the years’. And that was it, I started my own place. It’s proved to be a real winner, because we can make records for pittance compared to how much they cost back in the good old days.
Tell us about your famous Vortex miking system. I sort of stumbled on it really. I was doing a record in 1976 as a tape op with Brand X, which was Phil Collins’ jazz-rock fusion side project. Each one of the band had a solo piece for the album and when it was time for the guitar, the producer, engineer and the other musicians, being jazz types, decided to go to the pub and leave me to record it. John Goodsall, the guitarist said: ‘How can we make this really loud?’ Well he already had a dirty great big Marshall stack, but, feeling adventurous and let loose on a mix, I put screens on either side of the cabinet and make a sort of tunnel, like a big old bass bin – and it worked, it was loud. Then I put microphones everywhere. Because the desk was a quad desk, you could adjust the pan with a joystick, so I assigned a few mics to those and was spinning it around, but then when I stopped it, it was still panning and Goodsall said: ‘It’s like a Vortex, man’. Afterwards, I would use a close mic and a room mic, and, depending on where I put the room mic, you would get some kind of standing wave at a particular frequency, and if you had the close mics to the left and the distant mics to the right, balance them up and you get to a point where it starts cancelling itself out at that frequency and all the relative harmonics. So it sounded like random panning, which was brilliant for guitar solos and what it did, if you had one guitar in the band, it would sort of open the guitar, so you could have it right across the stereo field, but even if it was just coming out of the left side, the moment you chopped off the room mic you’d get a much smaller image. With it on, it felt like you were stood right there in the room.
Tsanagrides owes his reputation to the likes of Judas Priest and Gary Moore
audioPRO May 2011 45
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