EQ Magazine [Listopad 2000]
by Lisa Roy
On November
14th, Marilyn Manson and the death metal band bearing his name
release their third studio album to an anxiously awaiting public.
Let's face it: love him or hate him, this guy - a man who thrives
on controversy - is anything but normal. Therefore, it should
surprise no one that the recording process was less than
traditional. For a look inside the making of Manson's newest
offering, Holy Wood, EQ talked with the man behind the production
of this metal masterpiece, Dave Sardy, as well as with Manson
himself (see sidebar)."Making this record was like any kid's wet dream," is the way Sardy describes a nine month long recording experience that involved more than 20 drum kits, 50 guitars, 300 pedals, 15 classic amplifiers, and a variety of speaker cabinets. At the core of this project was a very connected producer/artist relationship that, in Sardy's opinion, was instrumental in the success of the finished project. "I think sonically Manson and I are coming from a similar place and have a similar history, so it was really easy, real obvious. That's why they kept asking me to come back and work on more stuff with them."
Sardy's relationship with Marilyn Manson began in 1998, when he was asked to mix "Highway To Hell" for the Kiss movie, Detroit Rock City. Manson and the band were drawn to Sardy based on work he had done in the past, including production for Interscope act Cop Shoot Cop, Slayer, and his own band, Barkmarket. As is often the case when artists are courting producers, Sardy found himself getting to know Manson and more importantly, understanding the very defined vision the artist has for his music. After mixing a song called "Astonishing Panorama of End Times" for MTV's Celebrity Deathmatch, Sardy checked into L.A.'s Village Recorder, where he was given the opportunity to mix a live album for the band. "They've got a phenomenal old [Neve] 8038 with flying faders at the Village. That's just a great sounding mix room. That's my preference: old consoles with new equipment," he confides.
One piece of "new equipment" that Sardy and Manson relied heavily on was [Digidesign] Pro Tools Mix Plus, especially when it came time to go into preproduction for Holy Wood. "There is no reason not to use Pro Tools," he states. "It puts 64 tracks at your disposal, as opposed to having to have a gigantic studio. It's pretty phenomenal, especially for doing demos." Sardy points out that the band has a Pro Tools rig that they take on tour with them. "Those guys are constantly working; there's not a moment that they're not writing and recording and archiving. They already had 20 or 30 songs together by the time I got involved, and then we did another 10 or 15 that they wrote after that point. It all got narrowed down to about 20 songs, which we recorded. So it's a pretty big process."
The process began over a year ago in Marilyn Manson's home studio, which features a Mackie 32x8 console, the aforementioned Pro Tools rig, a TC Electronic Finalizer, and a slew of compressors and EQs, along with a large number of samplers, a huge catalog of drum samples, and Manson's favorite Shure KSM32 mic.
Upon completion of preproduction, Sardy, the band, and a pack of dedicated assistants and engineers transformed the Houdini Mansion in Laurel Canyon into a massive recording complex. "The Houdini Mansion, which has more than 30 rooms, is set on top of a mountain overlooking an orchard," Sardy recalls. "It was pretty spooky up there...there are no other houses around." No doubt that was a good thing, as the shenanigans that were to follow would stir even the wildest of souls. They included "setting lots of things on fire and recording them," recording outside in the rain during a lightning storm, throwing the guitars in the swimming pool for a week, and throwing bass guitars down the mountain to see how it affected the sound. "Let's just say I walk with a limp now," Sardy jokes. "It was so insane."
The mansion's 2,000 square foot ballroom, with its 14-foot ceilings and hardwood floors was designated as the main control room, with Sardy's favorite console - a Neve 8038 - as the centerpiece. In the small wooden library connected to the ballroom there were two small marble rooms which were also converted into control rooms, one for programming engineer Bon Harris, who Sardy praises for his work on Holy Wood. "We hung deflection all over the place, but it was definitely commando style. After we deadened the place down with carpets, we found this gigantic American flag and used it to cover the whole ceiling, which really dampened down the sound. We wound up with a huge space that was kind of dead, so you actually had all this really great low end floating around the room. The drum sounds we got were pretty amazing."
Most of the mansion's massive space was utilized during recording. In addition to using the hallways for demo rooms, Sardy recalls that Manson's keyboard player, Pogo, took the upstairs and filled it completely with keyboards, MIDI gear, [cut "TASCAM DA-88's,"] and yet another Pro Tools system. One of the many bizarre "rituals" that accompanied the recording process took place in this portion of the Houdini House, which was usually "off limits" to anyone else. "Pogo had a room set completely up with weird rare synthesizers and old programming equipment in which he would run these insane experiments. He'll set sequencers in motion and leave them running for weeks until they start to just disintegrate, information starts to fall apart, so it was like every single room had these weird experiments going on between synthesizers just running by themselves. Plus, there was this rule that nobody was allowed to touch anything, because sometimes we'd wait for weeks on a sound and see what happened to it over the course of time, then we'd use it."
Pogo certainly
didn't corner the market on eccentricity in recording. That honor
should probably go to Manson himself, who co-produced the album.
Astute listeners can find examples of his unique flavor on two
songs, "Fall of Adam" and "Count To Six And
Die." For these tracks, the guitar sounds were achieved in a
most unorthodox way. Sardy explains, "The song breaks down
and there's a protracted acoustic guitar moment. There was a
gigantic thunderstorm and [guitarist] John 5 was sitting outside,
in the rain, with lightning hitting all around him, playing an
acoustic guitar miked with two [Neumann] U 67s covered in plastic
bags. It was incredible! Okay, so we destroyed a couple of
microphones, but the sound of it was amazing!"Not everything on the Manson recording session was done in a strange manner. Like many producers, Sardy relied on trial and error when selecting the mic to record Manson's signature vocals on. "His voice is just so unusual. He's got unbelievable low end, lots of midrange and high end. I've never recorded a voice like his. Initially there was a lot of testing to find which mic sounded the best with his voice, and a lot of those mics that you would assume would sound phenomenal didn't."
The verdict of the mic shootout was an Elam UM251 run through an LA2A limiter, but there was one "incident" while recording [cut "the"] vocals [cut "for XXXX"] that involved Sardy's own (now deceased) U 47. "At one point we balanced the U 47 on these huge daggers that Manson had bought. The daggers were on the floor and basically he's singing over them because he goes through all of these movements while he's singing. We had to poke little tiny holes into the grills of the mic; I'm not even really sure why we were doing it. There was a lot of rigmarole that we had to do for this particular vocal. It actually sounds really bizarre because you get this weird metal reflections, and it's pretty subtle, but in a lot of stuff that we did, sometimes the most simple thing in the world sounded insane, and the most complicated thing in the world sounded simple." Sardy admits that much of the recording described above was the result of what he calls "happy accidents," but the recording of the drums was methodically thought out by himself and engineer Greg Fiddleman. Each song on Holy Wood used a different drum setup, and more than 20 kits were utilized. Great care was taken in miking the drums. One setup might include lots of vintage tube mics, a [Shure] SM57 or an SM7 on the snare, an AKG D30 or a FET 47 on the kick drum, with a tube U 47 hung in front of the kit for ambience, and U 67s as room mics. "Recording drums is all about tuning drums; I don't care what anyone says," Sardy states emphatically. "The main thing you spend your time trying to do is to get the drums to sound phenomenal in the room. So I don't know that getting solid drum sounds is ever by accident." The drum tracks were routed through vintage Altech compressors that Sardy bought from the Hollywood Bowl. "We also had some Dynamax compressors, some broadcast compressors, 1176's, LA2A's, some Gate Stay Levels, stuff like that."
Sardy, who comes from a strong engineering background, points out that although Manson was extremely involved in the recording process, he was just technical enough to get them in trouble. When that happened, they turned to their chief tech on the project, Jonathan Little, owner of Little Labs, which makes Sardy's most loved piece of gear, the PCP box. "I used the PCP box a lot on this record. We ran everything through it; it was our DI, it was our way to do three amps at the same time, it's the only way to do it. It was phenomenal and a lot of the sounds literally couldn't have happened without it," he enthuses.
Many of those sounds came from Twiggy, Marilyn Manson's multi-talented bass player. Sardy recalls recording Twiggy for the song, "Valentine's Day." "I would say we blew up at least 15 pairs of speakers working with Twiggy. There's just no way to get enough bottom, you know. At one point, I kid you not, we had gotten these big monitors in there, these huge B&Ws and they have these holes in the bottom, like ports. The damn thing was blowing smoke rings out of this hole every time the kick drum hit! There were little puffs of round smoke coming out. All of a sudden we were asking each other, 'Do you smell something?' We looked down and the f*cking speakers were blowing smoke rings. You can't make this kind of stuff up.."