JUDAS PRIEST Producer Taks About Making Of 'Painkiller'

Greece's Metalzone recently conducted an interview with legendary producer Chris Tsagarides (THIN LIZZY, BLACK SABBATH, JUDAS PRIEST, BRUCE DICKINSON, GIRLSCHOOL, IAN GILLAN, KING DIAMOND, HELLOWEEN, YNGWIE MALMSTEEN, OZZY OSBOURNE). A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:

On today's production techniques:

"Things have changed so much from those days 'till now, because the whole culture of recording now has changed so drastically. There aren't so many of the big studios anymore where people go along and learn to be engineers because the economy and everything has changed. People do it at home; [with] the advent of digital recording, computers, it's a lot easier and cheaper for people to be able to do it at home. But the biggest reason is that labels have become so global, so institutionalized and they would only spend money on something they can see a quick return for. Pop music, something that's disposable, something that will make a lot of moneys very quickly so that the shareholders are pleased and the company makes money. So it's more of a money-making concern than it is anything to do with art. Which it used to be… I mean it's always been a business, don't get me wrong, but there was a little bit more of a personal involvement from the people who owned the independent labels back in the day. They wanted to see… obviously make money but also see some decent music coming out. And that's the differences, I think, there are between then and now. It's still the same if you have a great band they will shine through and will become successful, that will always be. But it's not quite the same system as it used to be."

On why records don't have the same feeling as they used to:

"A lot of it has to do with the way things are done these days. Because of the technology you don't have to play everything quite so well, you don't even have to play the whole song! You can play the central parts of the song and then have it all edited together, there are machines that put your voice back in tune, machines to put the drums back in time, lots of technology. This for me, for rock music, isn't really the way to do it. Rock music is an emotion; it's a feel, a time of a band's life that is captured on a record, this is what we are writing this is what we're playing. If you don't play it from beginning to end, I don't think that’s right. You have to play your music as a musician. I don't see the point in having some clever guy with a computer do it for you. And I think that's why records now don't sound like records did back then."

On JUDAS PRIEST's "Painkiller":

"A really brutal but clear sound. When I heard the original demo, it was just guitar and a little drum machine. The song is very fast. And I said, 'Where the heck are we going to get a drummer to do this?' They said, 'Well, we got one.' And I said, 'Oh, yeah?' And there was Scott [Travis] and yes, he could do it very well. With that, having such an amazing drummer, he set the level up that much we could reproduce the speed that was on the demo. And we set out to do a very focused; I told them we have to focus on this record. You have to be… If it's heavy metal it has to be heavy metal from the beginning till the end. We have to have all the songs sorted. And I was lucky, I had written a song called 'A Touch of Evil' and they liked it and they collaborated with me and that became the single from the album. This was awesome. At that time I was the only person that had written anything on a JUDAS PRIEST album, other than being a member of the band. And for a little Greek kid from Cyprus that was pretty cool, I thought."

Read the entire interview at this location. An MP3 of the interview can be downloaded here.