Bruce Swedien: Recording Michael Jackson : November 2009
In this article:
Ben Allen  Mixing R&B  Babydaddy • Dan Grech-Marguerat The Scissor Sisters' first album, recorded in a Manhattan apartment, sold 3.5 million copies worldwide. The follow-up sees them expanding their horizons, while keeping their DIY ethos very much intact. Artist/Producer  Writing & Producing With Robbie Williams Despite his best efforts, Stephen Duffy's solo work never quite made him a superstar — but it did get him one of the best co-writing gigs around. Producing Kasabian & Arctic Monkeys  Yellow Magic Orchestra goes Latino Yellow Magic Orchestra helped pioneer the use of electronic instruments and sampling. Now Uwe Schmidt, aka Señor Coconut, has used the same techniques to render their greatest hits as Latin dances, with contributions from all three original YMO members. Recording Morph The Cat  Folk Music For The 21st Century The idea of bringing folk music up to date is not a new one, but few people have taken it quite as far as Jim Moray. His material may be traditional, but his approach to music technology is as modern as it gets. Andy Jackson David Gilmour's chart-topping solo album was recorded on his own Astoria houseboat, a floating slice of studio heaven. Engineer Andy Jackson describes the making of the album. Mike Elizondo  The Current State Of Affairs What can we, as engineers or musicians, do to prevent our recorded legacy being lost? Record Producer  Richard Aitken of Nimrod Productions  Writing & Producing in LA The success of Avril Lavigne's debut album Let Go catapulted The Matrix to the front rank of songwriters and producers. Since then, they've moved in ever wider musical circles, culminating in their work with nu-metal pioneers Korn. Producing Hip-Hop Miami is now a hip-hop centre to rival New York and LA, and Cool & Dre are two of its most active beatmakers, songwriters and producers. Craig Bauer Craig Bauer has been part of Kanye West's career from the beginning, and as a mix engineer on the smash hit Late Registration album, he had to marry West's artistic perfectionism with his own technical standards. Roy Thomas Baker  John Fryer  Harry Gregson-Williams  December 2009
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Other recent issues: | Bruce Swedien: Recording Michael JacksonArticle Preview :: Legendary engineer on ThrillerPublished in SOS November 2009 People + Opinion : Artists/Engineers/Producers/Programmers Bruce Swedien has been the engineer of choice for Michael Jackson and his producer Quincy Jones, among many others. In a rare interview, he lays bare the techniques behind some of the superstar’s biggest hits.
Bruce Swedien considers himself a lucky man. As the man at the desk for Michael Jackson’s Thriller, which has defended its best-selling album status in the Guinness Book Of World Records for more than 25 years, there’s no denying that he found himself in the right place at the right time, and there can have been few doors closed to him since, given a CV point like that! But if you look beyond the glare of Thriller’s nine-digit sales figures, it’s clear that there’s a whole lot more to Swedien’s story than good fortune: although the first of his five Grammy awards came with Thriller, his records with Quincy Jones and George Benson had already garnered three nominations for Best Engineered Recording before that. The only child of classically trained musicians, he not only received a solid musical education, but also unquestioning support when their 10th birthday gift to him, a disc-recording machine, revealed the strength of his true vocation. By the age of 14 he was spending his holidays recording all comers, and even set up his own radio station to broadcast the results to the neighbourhood! At 19 he’d already worked for Tommy Dorsey and was setting up his own commercial studio in an old cinema in his home town of Minneapolis. By 1957, the 21-year-old was recording the Chicago Symphony Orchestra professionally for RCA Victor, before moving on to Universal Studios the following year, joining Bill Putnam in his pioneering experiments with early stereo and multitrack techniques. “Bill Putnam was the most gracious guy in life, and he took me under his wing,” Swedien recalls. “Universal was a fabulous studio. Studio A was a huge room designed by Bill, and was just gorgeous. The room itself was a musical instrument, it was so great, and I later did many, many big recordings there. Bill had me follow him around for quite a while before I really got started, but being with him was... whoa, what an experience! In particular, I remember him saying ‘Don’t just sit down here in the control room. Go see what it sounds like in the studio and listen to the music.’ And I still love doing that.” So Musical It Hurts
A couple of years after Bruce Swedien joined Universal Studios, Bill Putnam headed out to California to build his studios there. His place as the young engineer’s musical mentor, however, was quickly filled by up-and-coming composer, arranger, and producer Quincy Jones. “Do you know how fortunate I am to have worked with Quincy?” asks Bruce Swedien. “Quincy is so musical it hurts, and his knowledge is so complete. He studied orchestration in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, who also taught people like Ravel, and Quincy was a star pupil. “Let me give you an example. Quincy and I first worked together with Michael Jackson on the movie The Wiz. We were living together at a hotel in Manhattan, and we would go to Studio A at A&R Studios. We had a big session at noon on Monday to record some of the music with a big 70- or 80-piece orchestra, and we had to leave for the studio at 10am. The night before, Quincy and I had guests at our hotel for dinner, and Quincy still hadn’t even started on the orchestration for the opening titles. I was getting a little nervous, but he said not to worry about it. At about four that morning, I woke up and noticed under my door that all the lights in the apartment were blazing. There’s Quincy at the dining-room table with a billion sheets of manuscript paper, and he was writing orchestrations. I said ‘Quincy, we’ve got to leave soon!’, but he just said ‘Don’t worry about it’ so I went back to bed. “At about nine o’clock I got up again, and Quincy said to me ‘I’m all set’. There wasn’t even a piano or a guitar in the apartment; just Quincy and his manuscript paper! Off we go to the studio, and Quincy hands over his score to the copyists. He didn’t even want to conduct — he’d hired a conductor because he wanted to be in the control room with me. The conductor gave the down beat, the orchestra played the entire overture, and there was not a single note out of place. It still gives me the chills to think about it!” By the time of his first encounter with Michael Jackson, Swedien had already racked up recordings with Count Basie, Stan Kenton, Duke Ellington, Woody Herman, Oscar Peterson, Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Washington at Universal, before going freelance in 1967 and adding further artists such as Jackie Wilson, Buddy Miles, Tyrone Davis and the Chi-Lites to his resumé. So when the opportunity of working with Quincy Jones and songwriter Rod Temperton on Jackson’s coming-of-age album Off The Wall came up, there’s no question that Bruce Swedien was already established and successful in his own right. Lucky? Don’t you believe it! The Thrill Of Acusonic ...
Published in SOS November 2009 
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