It's all in the mix

The unquestionable success of Black Ice, which outsold its predecessor 'Stiff Upper Lip' by five to one within 10 days of its release on October 20 2008, was quite possibly the result of an exceptional set of circumstances; an astute choice of personnel for its production and AC/DC, who were back from an 8-year-long recording hiatus.

Black Ice was recorded and mixed by Mike Fraser, who is also known for his work with Aerosmith, Metallica, Van Halen and Joe Satriani, but also with Elvis Costello, Kelly Rowland and Norah Jones.

Fraser had worked with different producers on AC/DC's previous albums, and one might expect the recording process for each of these albums to be somewhat different. However, according to Fraser, there was not much between them.

"Each producer had a slightly different working method," explains Fraser, "but the band play the way they play, and they know what they're doing, so there's not a lot of coaching to be done. They have good instruments and the sounds come quickly, and because they pretty much do the whole record live, with only a few overdubs, the whole thing doesn't take a lot of time. We recorded and mixed Black Ice in eight weeks!"

"Angus and Malcolm had written the songs in England, and I don't believe the band even rehearsed before they came into the studio. Malcolm and Angus played the band the songs here on a little computer, explained the structure and chord changes, and Brendan would add additional suggestions for the structure and/or arrangements. Then it was a matter of 'OK, let's try it,' and they would play the song through a couple of times. After that I'd roll the tape. They'd do three or four takes and then we pretty much had the backing tracks down for each song."

"I wondered beforehand how the recordings would go, because the last time they played together was for the SARS concert in 2003. But they didn't miss a beat and they were really tight. Right away there was this wall of sound coming at us. I'm a fan of the band, and I remember turning to my assistant, Eric [Mosher] and saying, 'Do we have the best job ever, or what?!'"

The album was recorded and mixed in Studio 2 at Bryan Adams' studio, The Warehouse, in Vancouver. The room contains an old Neve desk from AIR Montserrat of which there are only three in the world, and which Fraser says are "immaculate and amazing sounding".

Apparently, one of Fraser's tricks is to keep the cables from the guitar to the amp head and from the amp to the cabinet as short as possible, thus retaining the crunchy sound. When asked how Fraser gets such huge guitar sound, Fraser explains that it is not doubled and that it's just Malcolm in one speaker and Angus in the other, and there are no effects.

One of the challenges with AC/DC, Fraser explains, is to make sure the drums are thumping enough, and that the guitars and bass are also in your face enough. The guitars have such a large sound that when you push them up, you lose the drums, so you push the drums up, but then you lose the bass, and so you push the bass up, and you keep pushing everything louder and louder, and suddenly you hit a wall and you have to start all over. That's the main challenge.

Fraser says that people are losing the art of recording, and the new engineers just seem to grab for the plug-ins and Auto-Tune things and place the drums in a grid, and that if you are working with a great band like AC/DC you don't need to do that.

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Tags: Mike Fraser, mix, Vancouver

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