Legendary Red Hot Chili Peppers producer Michael Beinhorn, who also produced Soundgarden‘s Superunkown, recently looked back at how Chris Cornell’s voice was so powerful, he destroyed multiple microphones in the studio.
He told Produce Like A Pro, “We experimented with a bunch of recording configurations. Eventually, I decided that he sang better when he didn’t have an audience. So I set him up in the control room and let him record his own vocals without headphones on and [with] the speakers out of phase. So all these sessions, he’s running tape machine all by himself, remote.”
Being alone in an empty control room let Cornell “put himself into the right place … emotionally without having to feel like he’s a performing monkey for the rest of us,” said Beinhorn.
He also said that Cornell recorded his own demos at home, so he had experience recording and working in a studio, but he didn’t quite know how powerful his own voice was when it came to very expensive microphones.
“I’m somewhat bemused to say that he managed to fry five [Neumann] U 87’s,” Beinhorn recalled. “I know this because I saw bills from the studio for new condensers, for new diaphragms. Yeah, five mics were destroyed in the making of this record.”
