Ultimate Rhoads

I thought this was pretty cool as I never really knew too much besides the guy from ELO arranged the strings on Diary.

NORMAN: I was very lucky. I got to work with a lot of good people. I remember doing those strings for Blizzard of Ozz. We went over to Landsdown Studios in West London, which was where Uriah Heep used to record. It was a very famous studio in those days. I remember using the London Symphony Orchestra String Section for Blizzard of Ozz first record. We also had a choir over there. Your paying scale to these guys so you only actually do 2 takes. Once they know how to do it, that's it. You just do one take and they get it right and that's it. They always tell you "Look record one take, and then switch tracks and record it on another couple tracks." So you get to double it, because if they find out your doubling it, they'll charge you more money. You have to try and sneak a double out of them.

KNAC.COM: Where did you do strings for Diary of a Madman?

NORMAN: We went to Abbey Road and we did them the same studio the Beatles used to use: the big studio C downstairs. We used a guy named Louis Clark who arranged ELO (Electric Light Orchestra). Funny story, it was a 10 am session and about 10:30 am Louis still wasn't there. So we had no music, everything was working and I'm standing there thinking, "Man this is bad news." You only get 3 hours or otherwise if you break another hour it's going to cost you double. It was a 26-piece string section out there. It's expensive to have all those guys. We were freaking out. And then Louis finally shows up one hour late all hung over, fucking hair flying in the wind. He was carrying two pints of John Courage in his hands. And he says, "all right where's the copy guy?" I give him credit! Man, this guy ripped out all these charts for these string guys in just 16 minutes. Louis had written the whole thing. Just wrote it out! He didn't even have a tape recorder or nothing, he just wrote that shit out and he gave to them. And then he got up there and conducted the thing. He said, "OK play it back." We went through the track and fuck he got everything right the first go. It was unbelievable! Seeing stuff like that, you walk away shaking your head, "Holy shit, that's some amazing stuff." I was lucky I've seen a lot of amazing stuff like that.


The Whole article is Herehttp://www.knac.com/article.asp?ArticleID=5637

i never knew that awesome info thanks for sharing that dave!!!!

Yeah that was a very interesting read he's worked with some of the greats. I thought this was an eye opener about 'Speak of the Devil'.
How many albums have you done with Ozzy ?.
NORMAN: 5 in total. I did 2 albums for Ozzy at Ridge Farm. In 1982 did the 3rd record, Speak of the Devil with guitarist Brad Gillis (Ozzy, Night Ranger, Vicious Rumors). We took a truck down to the Palace in NYC and record live for about a 2,000-seater hall. Since Ozzy was on a limited budget and fulfilling a contractual obligation with Jet for 2 more records. They could only do this one time. So I made Ozzy play a whole show in the afternoon with no audience and record that. Keep that in the can, and then if something happens on the night or is no good. At least we've got a choice and we'll have more material to draw from. Three of the tracks on that record were done in the afternoon and not live in front of the audience. If you got nothing to do for a couple of days you could just lie there and listen to them in the headphones and figure out which songs had the real audience and which ones didn't. I did Ozzy's 4th record Bark at the Moon at The Power Station back in New York in 1983. Ridge Farm Studio was losing money at that point so I flew Concord Air to NYC to start mixing because we were so short of time. Tribute was the last record I did with Ozzy.

Maxs work on Countdown & Youtanasia by Megadeth was Awsome,escpecialy Early Digital recording