Sunset Sound

[leadguy]

Ed's guitar is reamped (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Re-amp" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;) through the Alto Lansing speaker in the live reverb room at Sunset Sound Studios in the same way as Ronnie Montrose guitar was as Ronnie says in the interview below. http://audioheritage.org/html/perspecti ... sunset.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;.

http://songwriter101.com/articles/27411_0_6_0_M/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

"To compensate for the band’s one-guitar approach, Landee placed Edward’s guitar track slightly off-center in the mix, with a splash of delayed echo from Sunset Sound’s extraordinary live chamber filling up the opposite channel. “It made sense, because we didn’t want to overdub guitars,” says Landee. “If you put the guitar right down the middle with everything else, you’d wind up with the whole band in mono! So it seemed like a reasonable idea."

Slaving with effects might be the only way to come close to the Sunset Sound live reverb reamping tone.

It's interesting because guitar tracks reamped into a live reverb room and then re-recorded probably have some sound qualities of slaving with certain amps especially if there is a reverb like effect after the load in front of the power amp.
Ed and Ted say no slaving on VH1 but reamping guitar tracks is similar in lots of ways.

Ted says Ed was just using the Variac to lower the volume a bit so it looks like no slaving because if he was slaving then he could have just turned the slaved power amp down.
Ed says the same thing that the variac was used to drop the volume a bit.
Why start using a variac except to dop the volume a bit because Ed knew no other way to do it in the early days so he wasn't slaving amps in the early days.

"I'm pretty certain that the amp on the first 5 albums was exclusivly his plexi. I spoke with Ted Templeman once at an AES show and he said all he used on the first album (for gain) was the amp and he (ted) recomended the variac because they all wanted to play in the same room together. This way he didn't have to play as loud to get the gain he wanted and it would cut down on the leakage. He also said his pickup was pretty over wound because Eddie was messing around with hand winding his pickups at this point. Ted also mentioned that it was a party fest (beer) in the studio for the first album. Maybe that added to the spirited vibe(?)
"

The first Montrose album was done with reamping using the Sunset Sound studios live reverb room with padding blankets and I'd say VH1 was as well.

http://steveescobar.com/rock/Ronnie.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

SE: So, Ted Templeman is responsible for that big thunder rock sound you guys go on that record?
RM: Yeah. I mean literally we told him...I mean it's a real simple equation,..we told Ted that we liked Zeppelin and Deep Purple and Ted ,you know, he was in a band called...what was their name uh... 
 
SE: Uh...Harpers Bizz...
RM: Harpers Bizzare. They did a recut of Simon and Garfunkel's "Feelin Groovy" and he had just started working as an A&R guy with Warner Bros. and was doin' staff production stuff and he produced Van Morrison's "Tupelo Honey" which is how I met him. And when I had left Edgar's group I had my options of between going with Warner Brothers and going with Epic Records. The head of Epic flew out to California to my house and wanted me on the label, and Ted flew me down to L.A. and wanted me on their label. And I want with Ted because I had more of a camaraderie with him because I'd worked with him with Van. And we told him what we liked and I'm sure he went out and got Don Lande and I'm sure that he and Done Lande went out and got Zeppelin records and Deep Purple records and said let's get these guys this sound. I mean I have memories of Don Lande crawling around...you've got to remember this is 1973, and there wasn't any such thing as digital reverb. There were live echo chambers...live rooms that had speakers and microphones in them and they were called you know, live rooms. And I have 
memories of Don crawling up in the attic, crawling around in the room and spreading out packing blankets to dampen it just the way he wanted it. So that was the fine tuning of the live reverb room...to dampen the room physically with packing blankets.


btw from the Sunset Sound site VH1 seems to have been recorded in Studio 1 http://www.sunsetsound.com/history/history3.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; and VH11 seems to have been recorded in Studio 2 http://www.sunsetsound.com/studio_2/studio_2.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; and the photos of Van Halen in the recording studio for VH11 are while they were doing some tracking.

The live reverb re-amping room is in studio 1 http://www.musicangle.com/feat.php?id=1 ... =printable" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; where VH1 was recorded http://www.sunsetsound.com/studio_1/studio_1.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;.
VH11 probably doesn't have any live reverb re-amping and was recorded in studio 2.

Aint Talking About Love Studio Mix

[bmf5150]

i talked to terry kilgore (tube tramp)and he said EVH didnt slave when he was around in the early years ,so he doesnt think he did..

[leadguy]

Looks like why people think Ed's guitar tone on VH1 is due to slaving is really due to re-amping in the Sunset Sound live reverb room.
Slaving is just realtime re-amping and re-amping is re amplifying after the guitar has been recorded.
Both are very similar.

When people hear a slaved clip with some delay effects it's really just doing a imitation of a re-amped reverb tone.

http://songwriter101.com/articles/27411_0_6_0_M/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[bmf5150]

i think what your on to is more prob what was going on than slaving one plexi into another..

[45auto]

Man, we used to have a couple of those old voice of the theatre cabs with the biamps built in the back, I loved those things. We'd jam out in the driveway (until the cops came...)

[rgalpin]

+1 good times!

[LypsLynch55]

I love threads like these - is it just me or for a split second, do you all feel like kids again, just wondering about what it would've been like to be a fly on the wall during the recording of VH I (or any CVH album for that matter).

Theres only a few bands that really interest me with their recording techniques - VH, Zep, Floyd, and Eagles being the main ones - nowadays it seems kinda sterile.......

cool post leadguy. Thnx!

[Mr. Beasty]

I hate the slapback echo on the snare in the Ain't Talking About Love mix ... HATE IT !!!

[leadguy]

The reverb chamber is another piece of the VH1 puzzle.
Along with the Celestion and JBL tracks mixed together and Ed's effects like the Echoplex and Phase, the Variac and the main guitar studio effects with maybe a touch of reverb chamber and echo and the overall reverb mix that I'd say would have been done the same way as Ed's reverb was, compression, EQing. the studio room etc.

The reverb was done in the same way as the first Montrose album and the Beach Boys Good Vibrations and the Doors Light My Fire.

After all that, I think any small tonal benefits that slaving could do would be overwelmed by the studio techniques.

Panning to Ed's main guitar channel sounds more like a conventional Plexi but it's still had a fair bit of studio work done to it.
Same goes for the RWTD raw Celestion/JBL tracks.

Aint Talking About Love Studio Mix



Not much hope to get the VH1 tone in your bedroom.
Emulating it with slaving and verbs and delays and multi channels is about the only option and even that won't get near it.
Ed never had the VH1 tone live anyway.
He couldn't carry a reverb chamber around with him.

According to the sunset sound site, VH1 was done in Studio 1 that also has the reverb room and VHII was done in Studio2.

Here is what the Doors Engineer Bruce Botnick says about the Sunset Sounds Studio 1.


MG: Can you give us some idea of what Sunset Sound was like in terms of the room and the equipment?

BB: Well, we had one room, which was Studio One, which still exists today, although the control room has been heavily modified over the years. It was a compression room...the back wall was all brick, the floor was asphalt tile, the right wall looking out to the studio was shelving with sliding doors. That\'s where we put the tapes, because we didn\'t have a tape vault. Then there was the glass window, and there were three Altec Lansing 604e loudspeakers hanging above that. The left was a block wall covered with acoustical tile, and then there was a big door, which held the famous Sunset Sound echo chamber, and then there was the entrance into the control room.

The console was a custom tube console with 14 inputs that Alan Emig built for Sunset Sound. He also built Elektra studios, and was one of the original mixers at Columbia Records when they had their studios here in Hollywood. Alan recorded Dave Brubeck\'s “Take Five,” the famous Stravinsky recordings at the American Legion Hall, things like that. A multi-talented man. He was also one of the design engineers who originated the design of the tube amplifiers that United Recorders used. He designed a lot of those consoles, and then brought that technology over to Sunset Sound.

The whole control room was all brick, and it had individual panels of acoustical tile to deaden it down. Basically it was a very live room. The console sat on a platform, which was about six or eight inches off the floor. The tape machine sat behind us; we had an old Ampex 200 three-track, which had separate record and playback electronics so that you could select separate record or playback curves. They had a thing back then called A.M.E., which was Ampex Master Equalization, and then they had N.A.B., so if you recorded A.M.E. and played it back N.A.B., it would come out brighter. It\'s like recording with Dolby and not decoding. We also had an Ampex 300, I believe, three-track, which I converted over to a four-track with sel-sync (the ability to perform overdubs).

MG: Half-inch?

BB: Yes, everything was done half-inch, especially in the case of The Doors and Love, until we got to the second Doors album, where we had eight-track.

MG: Was the room itself changed during those years?

BB: No, the room stayed the same from the day I walked in the door, which was about 1963 to 1968. When I came back to do some mixing in 1970 it was still the same, except that they changed the console to solid-state.