Second Time Around
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Andrew “Mudrock” Murdock at River’s Edge in Boston. |
“I didn’t have much contact with them throughout the run of the first record,” he notes. “We’re friends, but it was largely a business relationship, and we live in different cities. I mixed a couple of live things for them for radio broadcasts. Any conversations we had, they said, ‘We’ll bring you back for the second album.’ I thought, ‘Right; not in a million years.’ Then I got the call: ‘It’s time to do the second one.’ During the time they’d been growing as a band, I was growing professionally. I mixed some serious records, produced a band with Steve Jones. I knew Awake would be a high-stress situation. I was happy to do it, but I also knew it wasn’t going to be done in the same painless manner as the first one.”
From start to finish, making Awake was a four-month process. Mudrock again co-produced with vocalist/songwriter Sully Erna, the creative leader of the group. The other bandmembers are guitarist Tony Rambola, bassist Robbie Merrill and drummer Tommy Stewart. The Boston-based group opted once again to record in their home town, choosing the Haverhill, Mass., studio River’s Edge Productions; it’s in a former warehouse in an old mill, on the floor above a boxing club. “Picture this old, wood building in a brick shell with 12-foot ceilings,” says Mudrock. “You see beams and wood over beams, and that wood is the wood of the floor above. What do you use in a boxing club? Punching bags attached to the ceiling. We could hear them yelling, hear the bags moving; we could tell which radio station they were listening to. Although the space was huge, the equipment wasn’t much—just a Mackie board and ADATs. I bought a Pro Tools rig and picked a mixing console [a DDA DMR12] for the studio to buy. I also rented some outboard gear from a friend. We spent six weeks recording straight to Pro Tools and then took a month off for the band to do a small tour.”
For Rambola, working locally was ideal. “There were no distractions,” he says. “We went in every day like a full-time job, from noon to 7 p.m. It was routine. I like being home, sleeping in my own bed at night. For the first record, we had no money. This time we had the dough, but we wanted to keep the same groove, feel and vibe, do the same thing on a bigger scale. We worked hard and did it all ourselves—same people, same ingredients, just better gear this time. We spent a month-and-a-half to two months writing, jamming, doing pre-production, and the record probably took two months. It might have been less.” Mixing was done in North Hollywood at NRG Recording on an SSL 9000J.
Reuniting with Godsmack after their nonstop touring, Mudrock found “a much tighter band. For one thing, they had a drummer. Sully played drums on the first record. The biggest difference was that they were all more mature. They’d lived some in that couple of years, Sully especially. Godsmack is very much his vision. As engineer and producer, my role has always been to realize Sully’s vision, because he has such a clear idea of what he wants.”
Reprinted with
permission from 
Magazine, December, 2000
© 2000, Intertec
Publishing, A Primedia Company All Rights Reserved
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