Van Halen redefined hard rock with their 1978 self-titled debut, and engineer Donn Landee talks about recording the project in a new, and rare, interview.
Working alongside producer Ted Templeman, Landee describes the demo session for the album.
“They cut 28 songs in about two hours,” he tells Songwriter 101. “That’s when we knew we had a band that could play.”
On the first week of January 1978, Van Halen convened inside Sunset Sound’s Studio 1. In order to capture the raw energy of the group’s club work, Landee and Templeman decided on a no-overdubs approach.
“They’d barely had any studio experience,” remembers Landee. “It was obvious that in time they would become proficient at making records, but at that point, we really wanted to get them before they really knew what they were doing - just have them come in and play and then get them out.”
“So we spent very little time in pre-production; in fact, we treated the entire first album almost like it was a demo,” Landee continues. “There are only a couple of spots where we added anything afterwards - on ‘Runnin’ With The Devil’ and ‘Jamie’s Cryin’ - and those were done in one take. And we didn’t use very many tracks at all. Alex’s drums were probably cut using only four mics total. Even when we moved over to Ed’s 5150 studio, we still did the entire band on 16-track and had room left over at the end. You just don’t need a lot of tracks to get a great sound.”
To compensate for the band’s one-guitar approach, Landee placed Edward’s guitar track slightly off-center in the mix, with a splash of delayed echo from Sunset Sound’s extraordinary live chamber filling up the opposite channel.
“It made sense, because we didn’t want to overdub guitars,” says Landee. “If you put the guitar right down the middle with everything else, you’d wind up with the whole band in mono! So it seemed like a reasonable idea.”
Van Halen’s debut went on to sell more than 10 million copies in the US alone.
The band wrapped up their “A Different Kind Of Truth” tour in July.
Frontman David Lee Roth recently revealed that the band are in the early stages of working on a new album, and audio of the session is available.
Hear what Roth had to say here.
See also:
Eddie Van Halen donates equipment to Los Angeles music school
AUDIO: Rare Eddie Van Halen solo track surfaces
Eddie Van Halen: Guitar Aficionado magazine cover story preview
AUDIO: David Lee Roth updates status of new Van Halen album