| The sound engineers at OEM Inc. have spent thousands of hours with the original masters of the most
famous songs ever recorded. They use them to create products like Jammit, an iPhone app that allows
you to remix and play along with those original tracks. There are many, many things to learn from
those original tracks. Through a partnership with Gearhead Communications, OEM Inc. engineers are
sharing their discoveries exclusively with Premier Guitar readers in what we like to call Secrets of the Masters |
During every second of every minute of every
hour of every day, somewhere in the world
there’s a kid in a music store playing the lead
riff to “Smoke on the Water.” The fact that
Deep Purple’s 1972 rock anthem is part the
repertoire of millions of guitarists old and
new, if not the repertoire, is a testament to
the song’s infectious, accessible groove. It
is timeless, even when played incorrectly
as most people play it. Like many legendary
recordings, conflicting accounts of its
creation can be augmented by media hype,
fading memories, and of course, any drugs
that may have been consumed before, during
and after the recording. Today, we’ll focus on
what we can corroborate from the original
master multi-track tapes of “Smoke on the
Water,” and piece together the real story.
Location, Location…
Deep Purple’s sixth album,
Machine Head,
was recorded under the watchful eye of
Martin Birch (Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath,
and early Fleetwood Mac) on 16-track 2"
tape at 15 inches per second with no noise
reduction. They recorded it over three weeks
in Montreux, Switzerland, using a mobile
studio truck rented from the Rolling Stones.
Remember, back in those days location
recording wasn’t as simple as throwing your
laptop and MBox into the back of your Prius!
Let this tale serve as a reminder that it’s good
to keep your recordings adventurous!
Master Tapes Don’t Lie
For most of us, Ian Gillan’s lyrics on “Smoke
on the Water” have already documented the
backstory of
Machine Head very well. A fire
broke out during a Frank Zappa concert at
a casino in Montreux, thwarting the band’s
plans to record there. This forced the band to
record in the “empty cold and bare” Grand
Hotel instead. Although much of the album
was indeed recorded at the hotel, the basic
tracks for “Smoke” were tracked at the nearby
Pavilion Theatre. As the story goes, the band
had set up and recorded a few takes before
police were called on a noise complaint. After
getting shut down, they would settle into the
seasonally-vacant Grand Hotel.
Soloing the original “Smoke” tracks today
may be the closest thing there is to going
back in time to witness Deep Purple tracking
this historic performance. When listening
to and comparing the stereo ambient room
tracks of “Smoke in the Water” to the other
songs on
Machine Head, I can distinctly hear
a larger room than what was captured in
the hallway of the hotel. It is clear that the
final take of “Smoke” was recorded before
the police shut them down at the Pavilion.
Furthermore, there is no evidence on the
tracks that could substantiate the claim that
the fuzz broke down the session immediately
following the take, as some stories
have insisted. Even following the short vamp
that happens after the fade, each instrument
peels away to several seconds of room
silence only to reveal a barely audible “…
have a listen?” uttered by one of the band
members or Birch on the talkback.
Sometimes it’s what you don’t hear that can
be more interesting: upon further scrutiny of
these tell-all room tracks, healthy amounts of
bleed from Ritchie Blackmore’s rhythm guitar
seem to blend organically with Jon Lord’s
overdriven organ while Ian Paice’s drums
seemed smaller and distant off to the right.
Unlike all the other songs tracked at the
hotel, there is no bass bleed into these ambient
microphones, leading me to believe that
Birch was able to sufficiently isolate Roger
Glover’s bass cabinet from the main tracking
room. There is, however, enough bleed and
band ambience in the bass track to confirm
it was not an overdub. It was, in fact, played
live with the others. In all cases, the direct
instrument tracks absolutely match up with
these ambient ones, proving that there were
no punch-ins or individual fixes to any of
the performances.
More Blackmore
Ritchie Blackmore. Photo by Neil Zlozower |
The anniversary edition of
Machine Head features
a remix of “Smoke on the Water” that
unveiled an alternate guitar solo. In addition
to that lead, there is another Blackmore solo
outtake on the reel that I speculate was a
precursor to both the alternate take and the
album version solo. It starts several bars earlier
and goes several bars beyond the length
of the actual solo section. It was played
entirely with the bridge pickup and seems
more like a discovery take with a not-quite
finessed version of Ritchie’s famous staccatopicked
bend-and-release figure that occurs at
the end of the final solo.
Chillin’ Like Gillan
Guitar outtakes weren’t the only unused tracks
residing on the multi-track tape. Ian Gillan had
a scratch vocal that sounded more like a guide
track than an actual contender for the final mix.
There were a few places that sounded almost
spoken rather than sung and the performance
was definitely pitchier than the master take.
Aside from several instances of different vocal
phrasings, there was a variance in Ian’s reference
to Claude Nobs (founder of the Montreux Jazz
Festival) who saved the lives of concertgoers
in the casino fire. On this track he sang, “
Dear
Claude was running in and out pulling people
out the ground,” as opposed to the familiar,
“Funky Claude was running in and out pulling
kids out the ground,” as can be heard in the
final version. There were also more of Ian’s signature
bluesy adlibs past the point of where the
singing stopped on the original version; these
adlibs kept going to where the song fades. It’s in
this section that we also heard Gillan say, “Break
a leg, Frank.” It was previously believed that
he first dropped that famous line months later
while performing the song live on the BBC. The
line references Zappa actually breaking his leg
after an unruly fan bum rushed him off a London
stage just days after the the Montreux fire.
Learning More by Listening
Well, we may not have unearthed some classic
rock conspiracy here, but perhaps we have a
better understanding of what went into Deep
Purple’s biggest hit, “Smoke on the Water.”
We may never see the Gillan-Lord-Blackmore-
Glover-Paice lineup on stage again, but no clash
of egos or creative differences could ever diminish
the spirit captured in Montreux, Switzerland,
December 1971—when rock n’ roll history was
made despite all kinds of adversity.
To see/hear how you can play along to and make new mixes of “Smoke on the Water” and other songs from the original multi-track masters, check out www.jammit.com
Frank Gryner is a multi-platinum engineer whose
credits include bands like A Perfect Circle, Matrix
Soundtracks, Rob Zombie, and Tommy Lee. Frank’s
technical expertise in audio system design has been
applied to location studios for the likes of Filter, Perry
Farrell and John Paul Jones.