Eddie Kramer

Engineering Greatness 2000

Eddie Kramer, Brooklyn Recording Studio, LA 2000

What did you learn from Jimi Hendrix?

Stay open-minded and let the sounds take you on a journey. When we first met, he was very quiet, very soft-spoken, very shy. We hit it off because I was able to deliver some sounds that he hadn’t heard before. He would come up with new sounds, crank up an amp, do things that left us breathless. That would inspire us to be different, take a chance, mic it in a different way, EQ in a new way, whatever was needed to take his ideas to another level.

Could you tell me about the Whole Lotta Love sessions with Led Zeppelin?

The entire album was mixed in two days at A&R Studios in New York. It’s 8-Track and by the way, the console had only two pan pots! We put the tracks up and 7 and 8 were the vocals. Track 8 was the final vocal, and 7 was the one prior. For some reason 7 was breaking through the console and I couldn’t turn it off, so you could hear it, “Wo-man. You need it,” slightly out of time, so I just cranked up the reverb and Page heard it and said, “Great—Just leave it!”