The REAL Story about Recording & Mixing of "Billie Jean" - R.I.P MJ :-)

To share some moment of our greatest "KING". I got this from the man who help MJ became "KING". Great experience :-) 

Recording and Mixing "Billie Jean"....

The year is 1982. The song is "Billie Jean". The sonic image of Michael Jacksons' "Billie Jean" is a perfect example of what happened, when I sat around dreaming awhile, about combining different recording techniques to produce a unique musical canvas with a tremendous 'sonic personality'. 

Of course I was comfortably ensconsed in Westlake Audio’s beautiful new Studio ‘A’ on Beverly Boulevard, with my good friends Quincy Jones, Micheal Jackson and Rod Temperton. We were doing our favorite thing... We were making music!!! We had just started recording Michael Jackson’s album “Thriller”...

We were recording Michael’s song “Billie Jean”.....

I recorded the drums,(played by the fantastic drummer, N'Dugu) with as tight, and powerful a drum sound as I could come up with. Of course I put N'Dugus' drum set on my plywood drum platform. Also at this time, I had a special kick drum cover made that covers the whole front of the kick drum. There's a slot with a zipper in it that the mike fits through. When the kick drum mike is in place, in the slot in my drum cover, I zip the opening tightly shut around the mike. 

I brought in my old pal George Massenburgs' spectacular sounding, portable, 12 channel recording console and used it to record the rhythm section. With it I recorded the bass, drums and guitars on my analogue 16 track, with no noise reduction equipment in the way of that fantastic sound!

In my estimation, the the result of the song “Billie Jean”, is a perfect example of what I call “Sonic Personality”. I don’t think there are many recordings, where all you need to hear is the first few drums beats, and you instantly know what song it is. 

Great albums always start with great songs.... 

"Billie Jean" is just such a superb song! Of course, Michael wrote "Billie Jean".. 

Quincy says that the lyric that Michael wrote is highly personal. I’m sure that’s true. Michael told us... it was about a girl, that climbed over the wall at Michael’s house, and was lounging out there, by the swimming pool.... she was laying out there, near the pool , lounging... hangin’ out... with shades on, her bathing suit on. One morning she just showed up! Kind of like a stalker, almost. She had accused Michael of being the father of ONE of her twins... Is that possible? I don’t think so.... 

When it came time for me to mix "Billie Jean", it was business as usual... When I am working with Michael, Quincy, Rod, Jennifer, Sergio and so on..... I am allowed total ceative freedom with the sonics of the music... In other words, I am always left to myself when it is time to mix. My mixes can take hours, days or even weeks.... I firmly believe that a mix is not finished, until it is on a Record for sale at Tower....

So I had been mixing "Billie Jean" for a day or two. I’d do a mix. ..... Say I was up to mix number 2.... (At that time I was mixing onto 1/2” analogue.) I thought it was killer!!! 

I called MJ, Quincy and Rod into the control room and played mix 2 for them. They loved it!!! They were all dancing and carrying on like crazy!!! Smiles all around! Then Michael slipped out of the control room, turned around and motioned to me to follow him... Then he whispered to me, “Please Bruce, it’s perfect, but turn the Bass up just a tiny bit, and do one more mix, please....” I said to him...”OK Smelly, no problem”...

(When we were recording “Off The Wall”, Quincy gave Michael the nickname of “Smelly” because when Michael liked a groove, he’d call it “Smelly Jelly.” Also Michael doesn’t curse, and when MJ wants to say a bad word he’ll simply call it “Smelly”... The name has stuck...)

Then I went back into the control room to add Michael’s tiny bit of bass to my mix... Quincy pulled me over into the corner and said “Please Svensk... “(Svensk is Quincy’s nickname for me. It means “Swedish Man” in Swedish... When you have a genuine Quincy Jones nickname like ‘Svensk” - You are truly honored....) Q said to me.... “Add a little garlic salt to the snare and the kick. Just a squirt!!!”) so I went back into the control room and added a little garlic salt to the snare and the kick. Just a squirt!!! Now I was up to mix 20 on "Billie Jean". 

Well, this went on for about a week. Soon I was up to mix 91!!! I had a stack of 1/2 inch tapes almost to the ceiling!!! I would do a few mixes, we’d listen... Then do a few more. We had it PERFECT!!! We thought we had a really ‘HOT’ mix on “Billie Jean”. I played Mix 91 for the boys... Everybody smiled... but Quincy had one of his funny looks on his face... 

I thought.... Hmmmm.... Oh, Oh....

Quincy said “You know Svensk, just for the fun of it, can we listen to one of your earlier mixes???” My heart jumped because I knew that my earlier mixes were dynamite!!! Then Quincy said, “Let’s hear mix number 2!!!” Oh WOW!!!! Hallelujah!!! I love mix 2!!!!

We listened to mix 2... IT WAS SLAMMIN’!!! EVERYONE IN THE STUDIO WAS GROOVIN’ AND DANCIN’ and HAPPY, and actin’ IGNORANT!!!!

Well, here’s the deal. When “Thriller” was released to the Whole World by Epic Records, on Tuesday, November 30, 1982, it went to Tower Records with MIX 2 OF "Billie Jean" on it!!! AND, when the single of "Billie Jean" came out it was MIX 2!!!

The REAL Story of "Billie Jean"...

Bruce Swedien

3 common CD burning types

People burn CD everyday, from CD music to data. Just simply put a blank CD in the drive, drag & drop files into the burning program and then hit BURN. Done.

But if you want to know what kind of that CD, these infos may help: (quoted from SADiE site) 

• Red Book CD is the specification for the most common type of audio CD on shelves, i.e. audio and CD-Text. SADiE supports writing of CD Text so that alphanumeric text may be displayed on compatible CD players. Typically the type of player that supports CD text are in-car CD players, although the advent of media players in computers opens up the potential for text display on screen. Still relatively rare, SADiE is one of the very few professional mastering systems that can create CD text within a master.
• Orange Book CD is not usually used for commercial releases, as it is less flexible about its PQ flag positioning than Red Book. For example, it does not support countdowns between tracks, and an Orange Book disk is usually burned track by track, rather than disk-at-once. Orange Book is the format used by standalone CD recorders such as Marantz, HHB, Pioneer etc, where the disk is created by pressing Record and Stop as on a tape recorder. SADiE supports Orange Book for track-by-track creation of disks, maybe for burning sound effects onto disk at the completion of each sound design project.
• Blue Book CD is sometimes known as Mixed Mode CD. This is where an audio disk plays as normal in an audio CD player, but when the disk is inserted into a Mac or PC, additional CD-ROM data is then available. This could include compressed versions of the audio, video files, graphics, band data, links to web sites, or any other data which could accompany the music. To create a Blue Book disk, a switch within the SADiE mastering page enables the engineer to write the audio portion of the disk first, and then subsequently add the CD-ROM data.

Have a nice day :-D

Nirvana "Smell Like Teens Spirit" Deconstruction - GREAT!

Yesterday, when I was wandering around some blogs of famous recording / production engineers / producers, I found some great videos. They're all related to music production, which is my fav. topic to read and learn all the times.

In this video below, we can see the multitrack of the famous song "Smell Like Teens Spirit" of the famous band Nirvana. What could I say? Perfect. These songs like this were produced in the beginning of the 90's. And nearly 2 decades after, we folks here in Vietnam still couldn't achieve anything in quality and energy like that.

First, let's see it:

Here my thoughts about this: Let's listen to the drums part. Notice how evenly Dave played, and his dynamic was perfect. The guitars sound heavy but have the openess, not overly compressed like cheap multi-fx box in VNese music. The most surprised to me is how the vocals were compressed. Yep, that is a "expensive" sound. And when we listen to the final CD version, we can notice how amazing the mastering process did to the mix.

Phew... sometime I feel like I'm chasing a ghost. Or simpler, I'm trying to match the speed of my bicycle to a Ferrari. Sadly, most Vietnamese people cannot hear the differences between that. They're almost sastified to distorted/clipped mp3 of cheap music - cheap "noise".

In my opinion, Real Art does take time. And it'll be worthy at the end.

This is my first post. So enjoy !