American producer and recording and mix engineer Mark Needham has worked with many famous pop and rock artists, including Imagine Dragons, Moby, Chris Isaak, Pink, Fleetwood Mac, Blondie and Shakira. His body of work also spans movie soundtracks, television shows and commercials. Asked to dissect a notable sound from his remarkable catalogue, Mark details how he generated the distinctive distortion on The Killers’ ‘Mr Brightside’.
Coming To The Crunch
“‘Mr Brightside’ by The Killers had around 24 tracks, most of which were done live, and the vocals were done live in front of the monitor speakers. In the reference mix, the tracks were summing back through eight channels on a Neve BCM10 with no EQ. I was trying to figure out ways to get saturation on the stereo bus by hitting the BCM10 really hard, and it still wasn’t doing what I had in my head. And also, I needed to have an A‑D converter to get it back in to a digital format.
“I borrowed a new converter from Leo’s Pro Audio, which was located in Oakland, California, made by Drawmer. I’ve never seen one before or since besides the one that I have — after borrowing it, I bought it. I don’t know if anybody else even has one still, but it was a Drawmer A2D2 converter that had a gain knob on it where you could really drive it into saturation and distortion. There was also some limiting compression going on from the simulated tape distortion, too. And I really saturated the crap out of it! I tried to go back and remix the song four or five times, and had told the band, ‘Maybe that’s just way too distorted and everybody’s going to hate it,’ and each time the band said ‘Actually, we like the reference mix.’
Mark Needham: I was trying to figure out ways to get saturation on the stereo bus by hitting the BCM10 really hard, and it still wasn’t doing what I had in my head.
“Then another engineer that was working with the band spent three days mixing it through his console, and the band still said that the slammed bus really just kind of glued the whole track together in a very unique way. So, we came back to my original reference mix and that is what you hear on the record. After the recording was done, I retired this piece of gear.”