Kevin Shirley: Mining For Unledded Gold - Page 4

It was quite complicated mixing, because we got all the multitracks, and it became a bit of an archaeological dig going through all of them--there were no notes, and even going back ten years, people didn't remember this and that.

Ed: I'm surprised there wasn't much documentation of the original sessions.

Kevin: You and me both, mate. And the two principals of the program as well. I mean, there were time that we trying to track down stuff, and we kept saying, 'you know, this stuff has to be somewhere.' We got logs from all of the storage facility, and we thought, 'oh, it has to be this tape' or 'it has to be that tape'. But we had to go through things and find out where the original tapes were stored.

Ed: One thing I hadn't seen before was that version of "Black Dog"--that was wild. It sounds like Jimmy was run through some kind of harmonizer effect.

Kevin: Oh yeah, that was whacky, wasn't it?!

Ed: Yeah! And he's playing a different riff on it than the original recording.

Kevin: And Porl Thompson, the other guitar player, his guitar track was nowhere to be found! That's why you don't hear him, in case you're wondering.

Ed: Really? I had assumed it was simply mixed very subtly.

Kevin [drolly]: He wasn't.

In fact, the truth of the matter is that I mixed the track before I saw the video, and I had no idea that there was another guitar player until I saw the video.

Ed: Was that harmonizer something that Jimmy had used onstage?

Kevin: Unfortunately, yes.

Ed: [chuckles]

Kevin: There was nothing I could do about it; I tried my best.

Ed: It's an interesting sound; it's not something I associate with Page.

Kevin: Interesting is a good word...

Ed: Ok! You talked a few minutes about the material recorded in Morroco. Was that stuff recorded well? Was it difficult to blend in with the material recorded on the stage in London?

Kevin: It was difficult, but that's what we do: you work with what you've got, and you try to make it as good as it can be, really. It was recorded as you see in the video: it's in the square, and there are Shure SM-57s on people.

You know, the "Black Dog" one was much more difficult--it was virtually unsalvageable, I thought. I don't know how that mix sounds to you, but that was very, very badly recorded.

The thing in Morocco wasn't very badly recorded, because it was just microphones; they were running onto DA-88s at the time, I think. So we had two DA-88s synced up.

Article Author: Ed Driscoll

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