par lordangus » 18 Sep 2020, 13:51
je vais te mâché le travail:
Tony Platt nous explique comment ils ont fait pour obtenir la bonne tonalité pour le son de la cloche.
‘Hells Bells’, the opening track on AC/DC’s first album without Bon Scott, commences with the slow, funereal–sounding tolling of a 2000–pound bronze bell. Manufactured by John Taylor Bellfounders in the Leicestershire town of Loughborough, this was recorded by Tony Platt using Ronnie Laine’s mobile studio following the completion of the Back In Black tracking sessions at Compass Point in the Bahamas.
“The bell that AC/DC had ordered to take out on tour with them still hadn’t come out of the mould when I arrived in Loughborough,” Platt recalls. “So, the people who were making it arranged for me to record another bell of the same size and key that was hanging in a nearby church. However, after placing microphones in the belfry I discovered that what no one had considered were the birds living inside there. As soon as the bell was hit, the first thing we’d hear was this mad fluttering of wings as pigeons flew away. Then, by the time the bell stopped ringing enough for us to hit it again, all of the birds had returned. We therefore had to abort that whole idea while the bell foundry people hurried up the process of getting the other bell out of the mold.
“As I couldn’t get the Rolling Stones’ mobile, I used Ronnie Laine’s mobile, which was in an Airstream caravan. At that time it was being run by a mate of mine, so we towed it up to Loughborough and actually parked it inside the bell foundry. The bell itself weighed one ton because that was the largest feasible size to take on tour, but the pitch of the bell as you hear it on the record is an octave lower than the actual bell; it was slowed down to half–speed to replicate the sound of a two–ton bell that would have been impossible for the band to take on the road with them or to hang in the venues. As a result, when that bell was hit on stage, it was an octave higher than on the record.
“The guy who made the bell was the guy who hit the bell on the record. We hung it on a block and tackle in the foundry and there was a specific spot, painted red, where he had to hit it. Being that I had a short time in which to record this before flying to New York to do the mix, I put up 15 or 16 microphones all around in different places, and recorded across 24 tracks using lots of Neumann U87s and some AKG 451s. As a bell’s sound is mostly harmonic, it’s very difficult to record. So, I went all the way from having Shure SM57s at the dynamic end to using B&Ks at the top end, covering all the bases. That was the only way to do it because I had to consider what we were going to mix and slow it down to half–speed. When you do that, all sorts of things you didn’t know were there suddenly appear.
“At Electric Lady when we were doing the mix, Mutt and I chose a combination of the close and distant microphones that produced the best sound, made a mix to half–inch at 30ips and then slowed that down to 15ips. Out of the takes that we had, we chose the best one and, because there were no samplers in those days, spun it in. We had quarter–inch and two–inch tape machines, I started the two–inch and dropped it in, and Mutt started the quarter–inch at the appropriate moment.”