Here I Go Again on My Own Spotify Taken Down

Concentrate! Ken Caillat and Richard Dashut doing the final mix at Wally Heider Recording.

John Lennon said it: "Genius is pain." And indeed, if an artist's personal misery often lends itself to creative achievement, then the mid-'70s incarnation of Fleetwood Mac was not only a case in point, only really a multiple helping. You see, by 1976 not simply was the marriage of bass thespian John McVie and keyboardist Christine at an end, simply so was that of drummer Mick Fleetwood and spouse Jenny Boyd (sister of George Harrison's one-time wife, Pattie Boyd), while the long-fourth dimension relationship between guitarist Lindsey Buckingham and singer Stevie Nicks had likewise reached breaking point. Since all of this just happened to coincide with the mainstream triumph of the eponymous 1975 album that spawned the hit singles 'Over My Head', 'Say Yous Love Me' and 'Rhiannon', and the record visitor was telling them that superstar condition was at present theirs for the taking, the ring members had petty option but to stick it out and record a follow-up.

Which is precisely what they did, drawing on internal tensions (fuelled by copious amounts of drugs and booze) to produce the band's magnum opus, Rumours. The recipient of a Grammy Honour as 1977's Album of the Year, also equally a diamond certification by the RIAA for sales that, by 2003, would acme 19 million in the US alone (and more than 30 million worldwide), the record sat at number one on the Billboard charts for over six months and included hit singles such as Buckingham'south 'Go Your Own Style', Nicks' 'Dreams' and Christine McVie's 'Don't Terminate' and 'You Brand Loving Fun', as well as other popular tracks similar Nicks' 'Gold Dust Woman' and all five members' 'The Chain'.

Still, information technology's 'Go Your Own Way', the first unmarried released off the album — and the only Fleetwood Mac number to have fabricated the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame'southward listing of '500 Songs That Shaped Stone and Curlicue' — that has proved to be the most enduring. And it's also the one that best encapsulates what Rumours was all most, with Lindsey charmingly informing Stevie that "Loving you isn't the right matter to do," and "Packing up, shacking up is all you wanna do," (a line he refused to take out despite her objections). Trivial wonder that she joined him enthusiastically to sing "You tin can go your ain fashion" on the chorus.

Fleetwood Mac touring Rumours in New York, 1977. From left to correct: Christine McVie, Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, John McVie and Mick Fleetwood.

"I very much resented him telling the world that 'packing up, shacking up' with dissimilar men was all I wanted to practise," Nicks after told Rolling Stone. "He knew it wasn't true. It was merely an angry thing that he said. Every fourth dimension those words would come onstage, I wanted to go over and kill him. He knew it, so he really pushed my buttons through that. Information technology was like, 'I'll make you suffer for leaving me.' And I did."

Then again, as Nicks also acknowledged during an episode of VH1'south Behind The Music, "Devastation leads to writing expert things." And no doubt about it, 'Go Your Ain Style' is a actually adept thing, boasting a cute pop melody, exquisite vocal harmonies, a dynamic chorus and Buckingham's scintillating guitar solo.

Pot Luck

Ken Caillat is a native of Northern California who relocated to Los Angeles during the early '70s and landed a job at Wally Heider Recording. There he assisted producer/engineer Bones Howe on numerous sessions, recorded Joni Mitchell's live anthology and tracked the strings on Paul McCartney & Wings' Venus & Mars, prior to hooking up with Fleetwood Mac.

This came about by style of Richard Dashut, a former housemate of Buckingham and Nicks who'd assistant-engineered their album and and then became Mac's live mixer when the duo joined the band in 1975. Popping into Wally Heider's to remix a show for radio broadcast, Dashut sat alongside Caillat behind the console and struck upwardly a fast friendship when the latter asked if he smoked weed and would like to get high.

"We put the tapes aside for a few minutes, smoked a joint and spent most of the night mixing tapes," Dashut would later think. "The band liked the job and they liked Ken, I liked Ken, everybody liked Ken."

Caillat himself remembers: "It was a Sat, and Mick said, 'Jeez, Ken, nosotros actually like you and nosotros wish nosotros had met you sooner considering tomorrow we're gonna piece of work with this guy named Kelly Kotera over at the Record Plant. We've hired him to record our next album up in Sausalito.' Anyway, they took off to remix 'Rhiannon', which was the next single, and then I got a call Monday morning maxim it didn't work, everything was off with Kelly, and could I do the mix?"

The mix was washed that afternoon, everybody loved it, and the outcome was that when Dashut was unexpectedly asked to captain the Rumours project, he asked Caillat to collaborate.

"Mick gave me and Ken each an onetime Chinese I-Ching coin and said, 'Good luck,'" Dashut recalled.

Every bit information technology turned out, the more than technically good Caillat did most of the technology, while the production chores were shared.

"At first, I was only going to engineer," Caillat says. "However, the group's mental attitude was, 'Hey, yous can't sit down in there and just turn knobs, kid. You've got to tell u.s.a. what'due south going on. You need to be our eyes and ears.' After nosotros'd done a couple of takes, I was asked which i I liked all-time. I was looking at them like, 'Well, why don't you simply come in and mind?' The fact was, they didn't want to come in. They wanted input from the command room. And so, when they so asked if I liked one bass part more than another bass part, I spoke up, and it was the same with Richard. He and I apace figured out this wasn't going to be simply a 'sit dorsum and plow the knobs' gig. Nosotros'd take to pay attention and maybe take notes one time in a while, and soon we were telling them, 'Hey, that was a great take. Nosotros actually like that second take more than.' Information technology was kinda like Producing 101.

Ken Caillat positioning mics in Studio 4 at Wally Heider Recording.Photo: Richard Due east Aaron/Redferns

"Although Richard turned some knobs, he didn't like to do that as much. I remember one time, Lindsey literally screamed at me: 'Goddamn information technology, Ken! Would you allow him do some applied science?' I was like, 'Well, I'm non stopping him!' Richard'southward a personable guy, and he did more of the talking. He was the one who cracked the jokes. And that was fine. I liked to turn the knobs. Y'all run into, the real turmoil on that album only took place at the showtime of the sessions and it probably lasted two or three weeks. That was down to not merely the relationship issues simply too the pressure to evangelize.

Pressure

"I call back one twenty-four hours they got a telephone call from the record company telling them how important the adjacent album would exist. We had been recording songs and getting some squeamish basic tracks, and all of a sudden their level of involvement inverse — 'Permit me hear that bass part again. Solo it up for me.' 'Why? We've already been high-fiving i another. It's great.' 'Just solo it up.' They all got very interested in reviewing their parts, then things kinda got a lilliputian more serious that fashion, and this was correct nigh the same time that Mick's wife left him. I call up him walking into the control room as white as a ghost, and of course everyone rallied around him, but so there was John and Christine's break-up. She'd sneak her new young man into the studio only every bit John was walking out through some other door, and we were kinda ducking — 'When are the two chemicals going to mix? When are nosotros going to have the explosion?'

"Whereas Mick didn't take any say in what was happening — his wife wanted out — and John and Christine's human relationship had degraded to the point where she was already seeing somebody else, Lindsey and Stevie were even so in the fighting stage. I remember them singing background vocals to 'You Make Loving Fun', sitting on two stools in front of a pair of microphones, directly facing me on the other side of the command room glass, and if we had to stop tape for whatever reason, during the few seconds that it was being rewound they'd be shouting and screaming at ane some other. I'd be thinking, 'Go tape, go tape, hurry, hurry, let's hit play!' Information technology was painful, especially as the guys were all living at this Record Constitute business firm, simply thankfully by the time we got back to LA, and everybody was sleeping in his or her own bed, it was just a case of getting together to piece of work every twenty-four hours. In fact, it was pretty harmonious compared to other sessions I'd do afterward on."

This often revolved around recording new parts once the basic bankroll tracks had all been completed.

"Lindsey might walk in the room and say, 'I've been thinking; I've got a great idea for a guitar solo on 'Go Your Own Way',' and and so we'd work on that and put it downwards," Caillat explains. "Or Stevie might say she had an thought for a background vocal and we'd piece of work on that. It felt nice and fresh because we kept rotating everything. You see, I really retrieve the whole topic of drugs on those sessions has been overplayed. Yeah, that stuff was around, but it wasn't similar everybody was crawling all over i another, and I don't recall it got in the way of the music-making. Information technology was more than a example of 'Hey, we're all getting kind of tired. Maybe we should get some coke.' Someone had introduced them to it, they had liked it, and what with us getting weary every bit the weeks went on, it was seen every bit a pick-me upwards — 'Oh homo, I'one thousand beat, I don't know if I tin go up and get today.'

"We worked fourteen- or 15-60 minutes days, and I always tried to outset the session at the same fourth dimension every twenty-four hours just could never do it. Xiv to xv hours didn't exit enough time, so every day we pushed back some other two or three hours. Y'all know, 'It's two in the forenoon, merely allow's try to showtime at noon tomorrow.' And so, past the time we'd go home and go to sleep, we couldn't make information technology. Nosotros were e'er trying to push ourselves to get in at a decent time, simply somewhen nosotros were starting at x o'clock at night and finally nosotros said, 'OK, this is crazy.' One Saturday we worked until 4 in the morning time, so we took Dominicus off, slept almost of the day, and started once again first thing Monday morning. However, we felt like we weren't getting enough washed and that we couldn't proceed taking days off, so the coke seemed like a skilful solution. Today that wouldn't be the case; I would just say, 'We're taking Saturday and Sunday off, everybody have a good night's slumber, accept a practiced fourth dimension, and we'll come across you lot bright and early Monday forenoon.' It seems then elementary, merely back then it felt like nosotros were all in it together, working 'til we dropped."

Slow Concatenation Coming

Although Ken Caillat generally didn't edit between takes, in that location were one or ii exceptions, the most notable of which was a track titled 'Continue Me There', recorded during the get-go few weeks at the Sausalito Record Establish, and described by him as a 'weedy song' with a three-minute bass-and-guitar solo that evolved into 'The Chain'.

"We kept trying to figure out 'Keep Me In that location' and we were near ready to crash-land information technology off because it wasn't going anywhere," he recalls. "Then Lindsey came in i day and said he had an idea. He actually had me take some blank record and cut information technology in exactly where the verses were. So we got rid of the verses, then he had Mick play the kick-drum role — we didn't know what the hell Lindsey was doing. He kept the drums and bass on the chorus, although he changed the central of the vocal and changed the chords, and he as well came up with an all-new kick pulsate on the poetry and new background parts. That's how he came up with 'The Chain'. We cutting the hell out of that tape.

"That's what I don't like virtually Pro Tools recording today — that whole matter of setting upwardly the direction of what nosotros're going to do side by side is gone. Afterwards all, with Pro Tools you tin can practice information technology so fast, who cares? Y'all can deal with information technology later, and I recollect that gets rid of innovation. You lot're basically running at the footstep of Pro Tools — y'all can cutting and paste, take a guitar part from the first poesy and put it in the 2d verse, and you do it and so fast that you don't actually sit down down and say, 'Gee, why don't we build some effects here?' I mean, there were times with Fleetwood Mac where we'd put on effects that would really modify the office and change the song.

"Take 'Silverish Springs' [the B-side of 'Become Your Own Way']. I taped this Sony ECM50 lavalier mic onto Lindsey's Fender Strat, which was kind of a crazy idea because no audio would be coming out of there. However, I noticed, when he would sit around and play in the studio, that I liked the sound of the high frequency that comes off the strings — it'south hardly a annotation, but more than of a second-octave, third-octave harmonic thing. And then I taped the ECM50 on there and he was really playing the part through his volume pedal, meaning that when he plucked the string and opened upwardly the pedal y'all'd hear this 'wah' sound', while preceding that there would be the little glassy clink of the ECM50. And then we ran the pedal sound through the Leslie and had a delay on that, slowing his part down — he was really going to double that part, but then when he heard the filibuster he started playing along to it and that changed the whole tempo of the song... You wouldn't have had that in the Pro Tools earth, where there'southward no credibility given to putting some space into the songs. Back then, y'all'd put repeat on there and create space, and you lot were painting a portrait while you were going."

Despite his reservations about the Pro Tools fashion of working, Caillat recently co-produced the anthology of his R&B vocaliser/songwriter daughter Colbie for Universal on Pro Tools, while too serving as a Managing Engineer and partner in Xepa Digital, a company that provides annal preservation for recorded tapes.

Troubleshooting In Sausalito

Rumours was recorded between February and Baronial 1977, and the first two months were spent at the Tape Found in Sausalito, mainly and so that the band members could temporarily escape the attention of attorneys and record company execs while laying the foundations for their new album. For his part, Ken Caillat took a leave of absence from Wally Heider's, promising that he'd attempt to have Fleetwood Mac record in that location once they felt comfortable about returning to LA. And he succeeded (more of which subsequently).

"It was a Tom Hidley room, a very dead room, and I didn't similar the sound in there," Caillat says virtually the Tape Constitute's Sausalito facility. "It had very dead speakers and a lot of padding — you'd walk into the control room and information technology was and then notwithstanding that y'all'd near hurt your ears. At that place was a 3M 24-rail machine, great mics, an API console with 550A equalisers, and a medium-sized live room; about 30 past xx feet."

The fact that Caillat was used to working on API desks at Wally Heider Recording made for a polish transition up in Sausalito, yet it didn't prevent him and Dashut from initially running into an extended period of big-time sonic trouble.

"Richard and I near got fired," he reveals. "I think it took us about eight or nine days before we could get a sound that was good. Everything sounded like a miniature person was playing these miniature instruments, and nosotros were just pulling our hair out. I'thousand sure Fleetwood Mac were going, 'What the hell did we practise? We simply tried out this guy Caillat on one mix. He certainly can't engineer.' Richard and I tried everything to make the sound bigger. Nosotros even taped ii boot drums together out of frustration, trying to become some size and some shell of them, only nothing would work, and finally I got pissed off. I said, 'Goddamn it, what the hell's going on here,' and I literally just started turning knobs, and within about five minutes of doing this on a rails we were trying to cut, it was sounding groovy.

"Basically, I remembered that the APIs like the preamp to exist opened upwards more than, and so I would bring the fader down equally low as possible and creepo up the input proceeds, and it seemed like that opened up the audio; that and +12 on every EQ channel. In one case I did that, I started twisting knobs, and boom-boom-boom, information technology worked. The band walked in after we'd recorded this one vocal and they were similar, 'Wow, so what was the last eight days all about? It just took you guys 10 minutes to get a killer sound.'"

Looking through the control-room window at the rectangular-shaped live area that ran lengthwise from left to correct, Ken Caillat could see a drum area at the correct side, with woods on the floor as well as on the wall that was to the rear of the kit. Baffles were placed around Mick Fleetwood, and also around John McVie, who stood facing his own amp likewise as the drummer, while Lindsey Buckingham was positioned behind the bass player — or to the left of him from Caillat'south viewpoint — and Christine McVie's keyboards were close to the window, somewhat isolated from the drums.

"Nosotros'd put an amp in 1 room, put some other amp in some other room, and take another room with a Leslie preamp mic'd up," Caillat explains. "I liked to set up the monitor mix and the headphone mix as shut every bit possible to what I idea the record would audio similar, including whatever furnishings would exist on in that location. And considering nosotros wanted to take enough flexibility for songs having different effects, I ever had 2 or three mics on a guitar amp — I could put one out of phase, slide the others back and forth to change the sound, and I'd practice the same with the bass. With a Leslie on a send, if I needed to send an electrical guitar through the Leslie, I'd just bring that fader up."

Frequencies

While the songwriting and performances were obviously central to the album'south success, the production and engineering cannot exist discounted. And this is especially true with regard to how the instruments not only blend together merely also retain their own space, courtesy of Dashut and Caillat ensuring that each was allotted its own identify within the frequency spectrum. A tracksheet from the Rumours sessions; 'Get Your Own Way' is second from the pinnacle.

"We had a lot of time to dial everything in, and the band members were incredibly tolerant," Caillat says. "Merely so once again, if you lot think virtually how we started, with them asking us to be their ears, that was just a natural progression. When nosotros were recording Rumours, Christine would ask, 'How does everything audio, Ken? Did y'all like this take ameliorate than that accept?' and sometimes I'd say, 'Y'know, Chris, I'm having trouble hearing the keyboard and the guitar.' The first time I said that, I didn't really know what I meant, just she said, 'Oh... Aye, you're right, Ken. Nosotros're playing in the same register. Why don't I invert the keyboard downwards a third and get out of Lindsey'due south way?' Which is what she did and it worked brilliantly. Afterward that I'd go, 'Hey, you know, you two guys are playing in the same spot. One of you should go upwardly or downward, so let's figure out who's going to take which frequency.'"

The prime case of Rumours ' excellence in terms of composition, arrangement, performance and sonic clarity was 'Go Your Own Style', whose complex drums originated in a discussion between Richard Dashut and Lindsey Buckingham that Ken Caillat overheard while driving them to the Sausalito studio one morning. In short, the two men agreed that they loved Charlie Watts' pulsate pattern on The Rolling Stones' 'Street Fighting Man', and Buckingham asserted that he'd beloved to hear Mick Fleetwood play something like.

"We knew nosotros were going to record 'Go Your Ain Way', and so when we got to the studio Lindsey cut the track with an acoustic guitar," Caillat recalls. "Then he asked Mick to play these drums that had the large tom fills, and although Mick couldn't quite get it, he 'Fleetwoodized' it, doing the best that he could to duplicate the Stones rails. John played along on bass, and after that we congenital the song with Lindsey'southward guitar and Christine's organ. In fact, before we left Sausalito I did rough mixes of every song, and that record was very similar to the concluding version of Rumours, just without all the picayune frosting and bells and whistles, including the solos."

Fleetwood Mics

In terms of the miking, Mick Fleetwood'due south kit was recorded with ii AKG 451s overhead, an AKG C414 with a 20dB pad on the snare, dynamic mics for the toms and a Sennheiser 441 on the boot.

"Mick was ever a fanatic for headphones," Caillat remarks. "He had to hear everything perfectly through them, then I'd have an assistant defended to just taking care of them. He had to be able to hear the part to play the office, and he was a really heavy hitter of everything except the kick drum. Nosotros used to telephone call him 'Feather Foot', considering there'd exist these tremendous snare and tom hits while the kick was going 'pfff-pfff, pfff-pfff.' In fact, if you solo'd the kick you could hear him going, 'Ag, ag, ag, ag,' all the time he was playing. It was loud enough to come through the kick drum, and you couldn't hear anything else with the gates on the snare so on."

The bass, meanwhile, went through a Fat Box DI. "I used to love that sound," says Caillat. "I didn't think you could go any better than that. The amp got in the way most of the time, merely still, nosotros'd record the bass on two tracks — straight and amp, probably mic'd with something like a 414 — and many times we then erased the amp when we needed another track.

"For Lindsey I always used an SM57 and a 451. I found that those two mics complemented each other, and if I put the 57 near an inch from the fabric and the 451 about ii inches from the speaker, a piffling off to the side, and and so moved the two faders up and down both together and independently, I could change the sound radically. And y'all'd become a really interesting audio if you also put phase on one of them. Added to that in that location was always a straight, although I didn't use that so much with Lindsey unless nosotros were feeding a Leslie with it. We had everything mic'd upwards for whatever effects nosotros wanted.

"The aforementioned applied to the keyboards — a chiliad pianoforte, Rhodes, Wurlitzer and [Hammond] B3. Pretty much all of the electronic stuff was recorded straight, but again we'd accept an amp in another room in case nosotros wanted that sound on a keyboard. It all depended. Nosotros had enough of time, and so when they started playing we'd dial up everything. You know, 'Let's put a little amp on that. It'll fill out the sound amend.' Basically, it was like we were mixing while we were recording."

In the meantime, guide vocals were tracked with whatever mics were least susceptible to leakage — SM57s, SM58s, 441s.

"Sometimes we'd apply weird mics, like the RCA 77, and I remember doing a lot of backgrounds around i mic, whereas sometimes nosotros'd do three-office harmonies with three mics and then blend them later. Everything got bounced downward, because we were filling up tracks. We'd have the equivalent of l or 60 tracks on the 24-track, combining and combining, going down a generation, and it's amazing because when I did a 5.1 mix of Rumours a couple of years ago everything sounded great. To retain as much transients as possible without saturating the record, I'd recorded information technology at 15ips, Dolby, zero level. I could have pushed the record harder, considering back then the standard was +3, just I wanted to keep a lot of headroom for transients. It was a different time."

Record Decay

With everything in good shape, almost 4 months were spent at Wally Heider Recording, adding nigh of Buckingham's guitar colours and harmonics, with Fleetwood and John McVie in omnipresence, while the women took a break, before returning toward the finish for some song work.

"Doing the backing vocals was always swell," Caillat remarks. "Lindsey, Stevie and Christine would sit around a pianoforte, and Lindsey would actually orchestrate what was going on — 'You're going to sing these notes. Here'southward how they sound on the piano...' All of the parts were just genius, I think. Nonetheless, it was also at Heider'south that nosotros nearly lost the album, due to the tape wearing out. Nosotros listened to everything loud, and I started saying, 'Are my ears going or does this sound duller than usual? It seems like I'm adding more top cease all the time.' Eventually I turned to the second engineer and asked him to clean the heads, and when he did this I noticed at that place was a lot of shedding going on. Every laissez passer we had to stop and clean the heads, but still we pushed on, trying to get the piece of work washed, until finally I said, 'Perchance there's a bigger problem here. Maybe we're doing damage.'

"At one point I even brought up the boot drum and the snare, solo'd them, went back and along between the two, and asked anybody if they could pick out which was which, and without whatever other timing information or instrumentation you couldn't tell the difference between them. So much character was gone from the kick and the snare that they simply sounded like 'pah, pah'. That's when the fog cleared from our brains and we knew we had a problem. The fact was, the tapes were merely worn out. They had been played so much, and that Ampex tape too had a problem that we wouldn't detect out almost until later on, but coincidentally we had a backup.

"Dorsum at the Sausalito Record Establish, when Richard and I had been trying to become our human action together and get the sound to come out of the panel, the guys there told us that, with two 24-track machines in each room, their usual procedure was to run both on the backing tracks. Well, I didn't care, so I said, 'Sure'. I've never done that at whatsoever other time, only in this instance we ran two 24-track recorders for all the basic tracks, and so when we now couldn't tell the difference between the kick pulsate and the snare I remembered that we had these simultaneous first-generation masters. I said, 'There is a solution, guys. Nosotros could perchance transfer all of the overdubs dorsum to the other record and use the new drums.' They said, 'You can exercise that?' and I said, 'I recollect then.' They said, 'Well, let's do it!' Of form, back then nosotros didn't have whatsoever time lawmaking, then we didn't have whatsoever way to sync the tapes upward, and I therefore called around and found a real technical guy at ABC Dunhill who thought he could do it. Nosotros went there and put the tapes upward, and we manually transferred them side by side.

"Record machines will never run at the same speed twice, so this guy put a pair of headphones on, and he put the hi-hat and snare from the original record in his left ear, and the hullo-chapeau and snare from the condom master in his correct ear, and we kept mark the tape and hit 'start' on both machines at the same time until it was close plenty at the start, and then he would use the VSO [vari-speed oscillator] on one of the machines, carefully adjusting the speed slightly and basically playing it similar an instrument, keeping the two kick drums and snare drums in the centre of his head. If he put his headphones in the right direction, as one machine moved faster than the other, the prototype in his head would movement to the right. And so he would plow the VSO to the left, and basically it was like steering it. I tried that a couple of times and information technology nearly scrambled my brain, but he did that all night long and saved our butts. Rumours would accept been dead, just virtually. What a coincidence that we'd just happened to record double basic tracks."

The Story Of 'Dreams'

"Nearly of the material for the album was equanimous in the studio," Ken Caillat recalls, "but Stevie used to get bored, sitting around while all the technical stuff was going on, so she asked if there was a room with a piano to noodle effectually on. Well, the Record Constitute told her she could use Sly Stone'south studio — a niggling sunken room that they'd built for him to work in — and i day while we were working on some runway, she came in and said, 'I've just written the most astonishing song.' 'Really? Allow's hear it.' So, she walked over to the Rhodes — which, like everything else, was always mic'd upward and fix to go — and she played 'Dreams'. Anybody else joined in, she did a guide vocal, and that was the keeper. Information technology's the simply time that ever happened. She tried to redo the vocal again and again, but she could never beat the original. I actually wanted her to vanquish it, because it had the drums leaking into her song mic and, in a couple of spots where she sang softly, I had to ride it up and you could hear fifty-fifty more of the snare. Yet, it was a ane-off.

"I always had the 2nd engineer line up every available mic that I idea might exist a contender for the vocal, and I'd take Stevie, for example, sing through each of them to see which one sounded best. The only matter was, to her the best-sounding mic was always a dynamic. 'Dreams' was recorded with a Sennheiser 441 — that sounded great for her, and that happened to be what nosotros were using. I liked the dynamics because they had that proximity effect, and I used to put a rubber ring around a wind-screen and identify that on the microphone, making certain the wind-screen was about a half-inch from the front of the mic. I'd say, 'Keep your lips upward confronting that wind-screen,' and that style I got a lot of bottom, to which I could so add acme if I wanted to."

Playing The Guitar Actor

Drama, drama, drama. Fortunately, the tapes were at present in sparkling condition, nonetheless things didn't exactly calm downward following the completion of work at Wally Heider's. Thereafter, more vocals were recorded at both Sound City and the Record Plant in LA, the band performed several live gigs, and during a calendar week off in Florida there were sessions at Miami's Criteria Studios, prior to the main mix taking place on a custom-built, transformerless board at Producers Workshop on Hollywood Boulevard. And nonetheless tensions were running high.

Fleetwood Mac, 1977.Photo: Richard E Aaron/Redferns

"We were at Criteria, Lindsey was working on guitar parts for 'Go Your Own Way', and at one signal, having previously been warned that nosotros simply had one track left, he filled that with another office and and then wanted to redo something," recalls Caillat. "I told him, 'We've just used the last runway, and then which i of the four takes that we've merely done do you want to go over? Otherwise, nosotros'll have to cease and comp it.' 'No, no, go rid of the last one,' he said. And so, I went ahead and recorded again, and then he said, 'Play the terminal one.' I said, 'You lot told me to erase information technology.' Well, he put his guitar downward, ran into the command room where I was sitting in a chair, and put both hands effectually my neck, shaking me like he was trying to strangle me. I said, 'Uh, excuse me?' and stood up, and he said, 'Oh, I'm sorry, I'one thousand sad.' Everybody said, 'What are you doing? Yous told him to get rid of that track!' But that'south how wound-up he was."

Sanity prevailed, and a expert job, too, for it was at Criteria that Buckingham's stellar 'Go Your Own Way' guitar solo was ingeniously assembled from numerous takes by none other than Ken Caillat.

"By being able to stay in the moment and recollect what was on tape, I knew every little lick that I liked on every track," he explains. "I'd have different pb-guitar takes on five or six faders, and I knew that this fader had this actually adept lick, so I'd bring it up and everybody would go, 'Hey, I love that lick, and so don't forget it.' Then I'd bring up some other one and they'd go, 'Oh, that's adept likewise.' There were nigh six takes of atomic number 82 guitar throughout the stop department, and I basically started bringing upward one fader and keeping it as long as I could, until it wasn't good any more, and and then I'd bring upwardly another fader and utilise that until I switched to another ane, and then on.

"It was a completely comp'd solo, and on the 24-rail information technology's even so in its original grade, with all the divide guitars, and you still have to mix that way. I recall, I'd gone abroad for Christmas holiday and got snowed in at Lake Tahoe, and when I finally returned I got a midnight call telling me to come to the studio because they'd been trying to mix that song and couldn't build the guitar solo. Then I drove there and did the solo, using mutes and faders while also having ii solos play simultaneously for certain parts, such as one toward the end where he does this slide.

"Manifestly, I couldn't have done it without Lindsey, who played the parts in the offset place and and then had to learn that solo in order to play it live. And I also couldn't have done it that way in Pro Tools. I was literally playing the console like a musical musical instrument. With Pro Tools in that location's no instrument to play. Information technology's all nigh faders on the screen, whereas I want faders on the board that I tin bear upon and move. Pro Tools is intellectual — 'Allow's bring that up past one-and-a-half dB,' — instead of being able to push the thing upward and feel it. I mean, it may have been kind of cheesy that I was performing with this other guy'southward functioning, but it was fun."

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Source: https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/fleetwood-mac-go-your-own-way

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