What is the secret to ELO’s huge sound?
Jeff Lynne’s Electric Light Orchestra are currently embarking on their final tour together and will soon play their final dates as a band, which will take place over 50 years on from their concert debut. After two hometown shows in Birmingham in July, the group will mark their final farewell at London’s British Summer Time festival in Hyde Park.
When listening back to the band’s early albums, it’s hard to believe they’ve been around for long as 50 years. While they are musically very much of their time, the production quality and values in their work sounds incredibly contemporary and modern. Combining this huge and pristine production with their space-age lyrics and glam style, the records must have felt positively futuristic when they first came out.
Experimentation and innovation in the studio were key in expanding the band’s sound on their albums. Their desire to try anything to achieve the fullness they were looking for, whether it was hitting a fire extinguisher instead of a cowbell in ‘Mr Blue Sky’ to achieve a fuller, larger sound or re-recording the drums in ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’ in a studio bathroom to capture the natural reverb in the room and then mixing that with the original dry recording from the studio, the band were open to innovation to achieve the sound they wanted.
And it was those drums that became such a huge staple of not just the ELO sound but all of Jeff Lynne’s production work. Taking on full-time producer responsibilities following the departure of band co-founder Roy Wood, Jeff Lynne has developed an incredibly distinctive production style over the years, which can be easily identified by listening to the drums.
Owing to the way he mics the snare drum to emphasise each beat, his use of far-mics and overheads above the kit and coupled with a huge amount of compression to squash the dynamics, he achieved a drum sound very early on that he has stuck with for the rest of his career. With the prominent snare and ambient bleed from around the kit, he always achieves a rich and full drum sound on his records.
From there, another secret to the success of the ELO sound is the huge amount of layering that goes into their tracks. With bright acoustic (and usually 12-string) guitars that often mimic what the hi-hat is playing, strings, synths and electric leads, as well as harmonised backing vocals, there is always a lot going on in ELO songs.
Like the drum sound, those harmonies are another ELO staple and contributor to a full sound. Inspired by his love for The Beatles and the sound they achieved in the studio, the layering and harmonies of the vocal lines help to fill out the sound and mean the song does not rely on the single voice of one singer.
The group are also no stranger to string sections, and some of their songs feature rich textures and tones from violins and cellos. Riffs that started out as guitar parts can be transposed to the cello and add not just sonic depth and power to the songs but also emotional edges.
Lynne carries these tricks and techniques over to everything else he works on, and his audio fingerprints mean that whether you’re listening to Roy Orbison’s ‘You Got It’, George Harrison’s joyous ‘Got My Mind Set On You’, Tom Petty’s ‘Free Fallin” or anything from the wonderful Traveling Wilburys albums, you can always tell straight away when you’re listening to something that Jeff Lynne has produced.
