Bruce Swedien was the man behind the glass for some of the biggest records ever made. He was Michael Jackson’s recording engineer, starting with “Off the Wall” back in 1979, and he stayed on through “Thriller” and “Bad.” If you’ve ever played those songs, you’ve heard his work.
He had a habit in the studio that most people never knew about.
Before we get to it, here’s Swedien himself, years back, talking about what it was really like to record Michael’s voice.
Bruce Swedien remembers recording Michael Jackson
When it came time to record a vocal, Swedien didn’t just park Michael at a microphone on the studio floor. He had him stand up on a heavy plywood platform. It was about eight feet square and raised maybe eight inches off the ground. Here’s the thing though. It wasn’t built for Michael at all. It was Swedien’s own drum platform, the one he used to lift drum kits up off the floor for a bigger, punchier sound. He just figured it would do the same good work under a singer.
Why bother? Because Michael couldn’t hold still while he sang.
“Michael always dances as he sings, even when he’s recording,” Swedien said. Most engineers would fight that. The shuffles and taps and little steps are the sort of thing you usually want kept far away from a clean vocal track. Swedien wanted them. He set the platform up so it would bounce those sounds right back toward the mic.
“I used that same platform to record Michael on, because he dances when he sings, and I didn’t want to lose those sounds and lose the impact of his dancing sounds,” he explained. “there’s a lot of ‘street’ in what Michael does, and I figured it would be best to use this drum platform and reflect those dancing sounds back to the microphone.”
So that’s the secret hiding in plain sight. On Michael’s records, tucked in underneath that famous voice, some of what you’re hearing is Michael dancing. His own feet, caught on tape on purpose.
By the time they got to “Bad” in 1987, Swedien had added something else. He stood tall sound panels called TubeTraps all around Michael for his vocals. Michael took to them right away. “Michael loved my TubeTraps, he was fascinated with them,” Swedien said.
And one more thing that tells you a lot about how he worked. Swedien said Michael never once sang a lead with the words sitting in front of him. “I have never recorded Michael Jackson where he sang a lead vocal with the lyrics in front of him. He always stayed up the night before and had the lyrics committed to memory.”
Here’s one of the songs Swedien helped shape in those early “Off the Wall” days, if you want to sit with the sound he spent his life chasing.
Michael Jackson, “Rock with You”
So the next time one of his hits comes on, remember what else is in there with him. See if you can pick it out.