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From there, they took Tsangarides out of the picture and asked Norman to take over because they liked the sound he was getting much better. Then the band would come into the control room, listen to some takes and they realized Norman had been cleaning up the sound. But Tsangarides never did, so Norman stopped rebalancing. Having helped build the studio, Norman wanted it to be successful and sound good, so he rebalanced the board when Tsangarides was out of the room, hoping the producer would notice it sounded better. Norman Finds Right Sound For Blizzard of Ozz And that's the way I'd always learned, so that was a little foreign to me that he would keep doing that." You learned to incrementally improve the balance that you have. You can't do that because you've got people listening. But that kind of infuriated me coming from a live background, you never wanna pull the faders down and start again. It wasn't sounding that good and Chris would just pull all the faders down and just rebalance, and he would keep doing that all the time.
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It was almost impossible to make it sound good. It was only a 7-ft ceiling and it was parallel to the floor, so it was a bad idea to put drums in there. Unfortunately this stone room was too small. At that point everybody was trying to make stone rooms. "That was because of Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight" with his big drum fill. "The first mistake (Tsangarides) made was he put the drums downstairs in what we called the stone room," said Norman. Norman had helped set up the studio and became the in-house engineer, so he was very familiar with the layout and equipment. Located in the village of Rusper, near the Surrey/Essex border. In fact, Norman - the de facto producer of Blizzard and Diary of a Madman - wasn't even supposed to be the guy behind the board on those first two Ozzy classics, which featured the late, great guitar virtuoso Randy Rhoads, bassist/songwriter Bob Daisley and drummer Lee Kerslake.Ĭhris Tsangarides (UFO, Thin Lizzy, Judas Priest) was originally brought in to produce the Blizzard of Ozz album, but it wasn't working out with Tsangarides, so Ozzy asked Norman if he could engineer the record, which was laid down at Ridge Farm Studio, The rest of the band showed up and the equipment showed up and we got started." "I didn't say much and he really didn't say much. I thought he was a roadie," said Norman on a recent Eddie Trunk podcast. It's a long way back in time now, but the man who helped Ozzy Osbourne record two of the greatest albums in metal history still has a pretty good memory of how they were made back in the early 1980s.Īnd, just prior to starting the recording of Blizzard of Ozz in March 1980, producer Max Norman, admits he didn't recognize Ozzy.