Max Norman interviewed by Jas Obrecht about BOO and DOAM:
How did your role change from the first album to Diary of a Madman?
Pretty much the same. I had a little more influence, I guess, on the second one. The first one was a bit untogether in a lot of different ways, because Ozzy was trying to get things back together again, so he had a lot of things to do. He was doing a lot of running around, trying to get deals and so on. So that first one kind of fell together. The second one we had a lot more organized.
Did you change the recording strategy?
Yeah. In fact, for the first album, the drums were downstairs in that concrete room for some of the tracks. I didn’t do that on the second one – I put them in the main body of the studio with a lot more distance mikes on them. I think the drum sound improved on the second one. The first drum sound wasn’t as big as I would have liked.
There was a European tour between the first and second albums. Had Randy changed over that time?
He played better. He was just getting better all the time. I mean, he was shit-hot on the second album. The improvements were really noticeable. Stuff that would have taken longer to do didn’t take so long anymore, plus he had a lot more idea of what arrangements he wanted to do.
“Over the Mountain” has a lot more presence. Was that recorded differently?
No, all the backing tracks were recorded the same way. There’s a lot of different things we did on the guitars. We got into very curious extremes with recording some of the guitars. The basic setup was always the same, but we did a lot of stuff in the control room to change the sound around and get different kinds of feels.
You mean change the actual tonal quality of the sound?
Yeah, the tonality of the sound. Sometimes I would run him through a little compressor on the board before going to the amp, and stuff like that. I would help the EQ on his guitar by putting it through the board first, and then send it down to the amp downstairs. But generally the miking setup and the speaker setup were the same.
Was the “Flying High Again” solo multi-tracked?
This is the one where he goes [sings the triplets] and changes key? Yeah, that was triple-tracked, probably, playing the same part each time.
Do you know what effect was on it?
AMS, again.
“You Can’t Kill Rock and Roll” ends with some massive guitar sounds.
Yeah, that was one where he said, “Just roll it around to me, and I’ll whack some stuff on the end there.” That was pretty much a one-take, the main lead guitar going out there. Plus we put on some big, heavy-duty power chords towards the end there.
What’s going on in the beginning of “Believer,” right before the lick starts up?
Oh, I remember that. That’s guitar work, just messing around before the track comes in. We just got to like it, so we left it on there. There’s a few little bits and bobs like that. There’s little accidents that happen and you think, “Oh, that sounds great. We’ll leave that on there.”
To me, the rhythm guitar in “Little Dolls” sounds a bit like Van Halen.
Hmm. Hmm. Yeah.
The solo is mixed in the background too.
Yeah, I think that was one of the tracks we had a little bit of trouble getting to work very well. As for the solo being back, it may well be that we only put one track on that. Like I say, a lot of the reasons for Randy’s particular guitar sound is the fact that he triple-tracked a lot of it, and that just made it huge. So I believe “Little Dolls” may have been one of the ones where we didn’t do that, and it may have suffered somewhat.
At the beginning of “Tonight,” was Randy doing volume swells with the knob on his guitar?
Yes, he was.
Near the very end he gets into that jam where he flicks his pickup selector switch, like Hendrix used to do.
Yeah.
How long did that jam go on after the fade?
Oh, quite a long time. I think it was about another two minutes or something going on there. Some of the tracks were pretty long, and we had to do some early fades on them. Tantalizing stuff, you know. You hear it going out, and you think, “Oh, I wish it didn’t go out quite there!” But the timing. The first album was quite a long one – in fact, they’re both quite long. So we had to fade some things out to be able to get it on vinyl.
http://jasobrecht.com/randy-rhoads-max- ... interview/
So when I first saw that they had ReReleased those in 2002 I didnt Know they were ReRecorded,afterall those were the first CDs I got back in the early 90s when I got my 1st CD player & I had also gotten the 95 Remasters too.To this Day I still prefer the Original 87 Versions as they arnt Mastered Too hot & have a Overall Clearer sound To my Ears!