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Ridge Farm

Posted: Fri Nov 28, 2014 6:44 pm
by mojopin70
For those who might be interested, the first photo top left is from the control room looking out into the the main room, the second photo in black and white , shows Bob , Ozzy and Randy looking towards the control room. The bottom left photo shows the stone steps going down to where Lee first had his drums then later Randy's amps and that's where they stayed for the recordings on both albums :

Guitarist Randy Rhoads employed a two-part process when recording his solos for Blizzard of Ozz, Ozzy Osbourne’s first album following his ouster from Black Sabbath. First, the classically trained young shredder would take his customized Jackson guitars to a stone room downstairs at England’s Ridge Farm Studios where he would work out each of his solos, among them “Crazy Train.”

“This was after we did the backing tracks,” says Blizzard of Ozz engineer Max Norman. “Randy had a Marshall and a couple of 4x12s, and we had him set up in this room with the cabinets facing up out into the main studio. They were miked at various points: close, at three feet, and again at about 12 feet. I would make Randy a loop of the solo section and we’d just let that play into these big monitors downstairs, where he would just sit and jam away for hours and hours until he had composed his completed solo.”With the solos arranged to his liking, Rhoads would then report upstairs to the control room to record them.“We’d plug the guitar directly into the console,” recalls Norman.



“We’d preamp it in the console and send it down to the amp from there. That way we could control the amount of gain that hit the amp, which is always a problem when running a remote amplifier and trying to get a good enough signal to it.“Randy would put down his solos pretty quickly once he had them worked out. We’d do two or three takes to get the majority of the solo down, then maybe punch in a few little fix ups. He’d try to get the first take as good as possible, then he’d double it and triple it.

Ozzy always wondered why Randy double tracked everything, and he really didn’t want him to. I must admit, at the time I really didn’t think it was a very good idea, either—but when you double and triple track a solo, it actually adds to the accuracy because it’s somewhat more forgiving as far as pitch and timing; it blurs the edges.“Of the three tracks on each solo, the one that we liked the best would be pretty much down the center of the mix, and the other two would be ghosted back 3 or 4 db, swung out pretty wide on either side. What happens then is that it doesn’t become such an obvious double or triple track—it’s more of an effect, really, because you tend to get the phasing between the different pitches. In addition, with guitars two and three panned left and right, you get a fourth guitar—a phantom guitar—in the middle. So what Randy’s got on those solos is a double track of his main guitar, and the other two guitars attempting to create a ghost guitar. It actually averages out pretty well—it works better than you might think.”



“I’d have to say that ‘Mr. Crowley’ is my most memorable solo, I had spent hours trying to figure out a solo for the song, but wasn’t getting anywhere. I finally put something down. Then Ozzy came in and said, ‘It’s crap—everything you’re playing is crap.’ He told me to get in there and just play how I felt. He made me really nervous, so I just played anything. When I came back to listen to it, he said it was great, and I had to agree.” ~Randy Rhoads~

Re: Ridge Farm

Posted: Fri Nov 28, 2014 9:42 pm
by Stiltzkin
nice read :)

Re: Ridge Farm

Posted: Fri Nov 28, 2014 10:55 pm
by P C M
Good read and a great idea how thing's were done brother. Thanks. :)

Re: Ridge Farm

Posted: Mon Dec 01, 2014 7:23 pm
by orion_damage
Pretty neat perspective on things. Could you imagine how incredible that would have been if someone had a video camera in that place?