The Sound of Mutt

A look at legendary producer Mutt Lange’s most innovative sounds and techniques

Mutt Lange

Last year, while visiting Europe, my travels took me to the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, at the foot of the Alps.

As my travel companion and I walked through the Swiss town of Pully, past imposing gates to expensive lakefront mansions, I wondered aloud if Robert “Mutt” Lange was behind any of them, toiling away in a home studio. The producer, I’d read, lives somewhere on the lake.

Like a lot of other musicians and audio engineer types, I’m fascinated with Mutt Lange both as a personality and as the tactician behind some of the biggest-selling, most sonically-engrossing mainstream albums of all time. His resume includes genre-defining records like Def Leppard’s Hysteria and AC/DC’s Back in Black, and massive country crossover hits from Shania Twain (his ex-wife) like Come On Over. Even if you’re not a Mutt Lange enthusiast, chances are you’ve experienced one of his productions before, whether you know it or not.

While I always passingly appreciated Mutt Lange’s bloodlessly effective work, it was the Lange-produced Heartbeat City by The Cars that served as my entry point into my more recent obsession. Since then I’ve been preoccupied with exploring his sounds and methods.

Turns out I’m not alone. There’s a virtual cottage industry dedicated to breaking down his production techniques, including podcasts, YouTube channels, and articles. Since the famously reclusive Lange doesn’t grant interviews—hasn’t since the ‘80s—it’s up to these intrepid souls to pick up any breadcrumbs they can find, and/or reverse engineer his work.

In this article, we’ll delve into some of Mutt’s more notable production techniques and sounds, most of which I learned about via a combination of the aforementioned online resources. Two YouTubers I recommend for learning about Mutt’s methods are Bobby Huff and Cade Roberts.

Editor’s note: This article is solely focused on Mutt Lange’s techniques. If you want to learn about the man himself, Christopher Noxon wrote an engrossing 2002 piece about Mutt Lange that lives on the author’s website.

Mutt Lange Production Techniques

The For Those About to Rock Snare

It’s often said (by me, mainly) that a snare sound can make or break a rock song. And there’s perhaps no greater rock snare sound than the one Mutt got on AC/DC’s two early ‘80s records, Back in Black and For Those About to Rock.

Whereas the snare drum on later Mutt Lange-produced albums like Def Leppard’s Hysteria and The Cars’ Heartbeat City was largely sample-driven, AC/DC’s sounded more natural, making use of drummer Phil Rudd’s powerful hits. Mutt reportedly worked to amplify these hits by bussing them (i.e. sending the audio) to a pitched-down Eventide Harmonizer unit.

I know from personal experience that it’s easy to go too far with this method, resulting in an overly thuddy-sounding snare drum. Mutt avoided this on For Those About to Rock, striking the perfect balance between low-end impact and tasteful mix placement.

Credit should also go to the band’s arrangements, which dance around the kick and snare in a way that make them distinct in the mix. If Angus Young and the boys were playing in more of a strummy manner, the impact of the snare drum would no doubt get lost.

Check out AC/DC’s “Let’s Get It Up” for the Mutt snare in full effect:

The “Magic” Snare

I’ll never forget the first time I heard—or paid proper attention to, anyway—the snare on The Cars’ “Magic.” It made such an impression on me that I can remember the exact road I was driving on when it came out of my car speakers. I remember thinking, “This is the most perfect sounding snare I’ve ever heard.”

The snare on “Magic” is more reverby and ‘80s sounding than the AC/DC one, very obviously a sample that Mutt got with his Fairlight sampling computer. The dead giveaway is that every hit sounds uniformly the same, which is to say, perfect. Plus, Cars drummer David Robinson said he barely played on the Heartbeat City record (think about that—this is a guy who went to Berklee, a pro-level drummer on every level— and Mutt decided not to have him play. Time has proven Mutt’s decision correct however).

The Fairlight sample was likely augmented with an electronic Simmons drum tom hit to give it Mutt’s trademark low-end oomph, a known technique of his. Mutt tended to grab only the tail end of the hit, which he then sampled and laid under the main snare sample.

This is a method I’ve tried to employ on my own band’s music to make the snare sound more present. Here’s an example, on our song “Memory Kid”:

But you didn’t come here for The Rightovers, you came here for Mutt. And so, here’s The Cars’ “Magic” in all its glory:

The Hysteria Backup Vocal Technique

If there’s one thing that distinguishes Mutt Lange’s productions from those of other high profile rock producers, it’s his wall-of-sound vocal harmonies. There’s no better example of this than Def Leppard’s Hysteria record.

Mutt Lange was known to stack hundreds (yes, hundreds) of vocal tracks together to get his sound. To get the voices to sit comfortably together, he did some extreme scooping out of the mid frequencies.

He then employed a technique to known as the “Dolby vocal trick” involving a Dolby noise reduction unit. The intended purpose of this machine was to reduce tape hiss. However, producers figured out that by twiddling the knobs just so, they could simultaneously enhance, or expand, the top-end frequencies of things, namely vocals, in a way that sounded pleasing, and help them stand out in the mix (trust me when I say this explanation is a serious dumbing-down of this process; check out AudioThing’s walk-through for a more technically-sound one).

Mutt applied this effect on the stacks of backup vocals on Def Leppard’s Hysteria in a way that really made them pop. There’s perhaps no better example of this than on “Gods of War”:

As with many of the other techniques on this list, there’s more to it than just the engineering moves. In this case, it should be noted that every member of Def Leppard could (and can) really sing; Joe Elliot recently said something like, “If you heard all of us singing together in a room, a cappella, it would make you weep.” Also, Mutt Lange reportedly has an incredible voice as well, and he sang along on the harmony parts throughout Hysteria. The moral of the story, kids, is that it takes more than some knob twiddling to get to the top.

The Shania Twain Bass Sound

One element of Mutt’s productions that made them ideally suited to radio were the tight, rich, punchy bass sounds he was able to achieve. This was especially the case on the hit records he made with Shania.

At first blush, you might guess that the majority of the bass on these Shania Twain albums is played on a synthesizer. But you’d only be half right. According to Shania Twain’s touring bass player Derek Frank, Mutt supplemented these synth bass notes with the sound of a pick plucking a dead bass string, to give them a more percussive feel. Check out Frank’s explanation below:

Once again, Mutt went the extra mile in the stacking of sounds to get him where he wanted to go. Clearly, it worked—Shania’s record sales exceed 100 million, making her one of the best-selling artists of all-time. Here’s my favorite song of hers, “You’re Still the One”:

The “Hysteria” Bridge Guitar Sound

It takes a very patient, meticulous, and slightly insane producer to demand that the guitar player he’s (or she’s) working with separately track each individual string of a chord to get the desired sound. Mutt Lange is just that producer.

This is one of the urban legends about Mutt Lange that’s actually true: Def Leppard’s Phil Colleen has confirmed that the producer made him play each string of each chord on the bridge of the title track from Hysteria. This, in theory at least, gave the guitar part an especially chiming, resplendent sound. We don’t have anything to compare it to, so we’ll have to trust that this was the only way to get there. And who are we to question Sir Mutt’s methods anyway.

Regardless, the bridge (or pre-chorus, or whatever you want to call it) on “Hysteria” is a truly triumphant part on a majestic song. No matter how many times I hear it, it does something to me.

Check it out—it’s the part where Joe Elliot sings, “I got to know tonight, if you’re alone tonight”:

The Mutt Lange Chorus Writing Approach on Hysteria

I was trying to describe why I like Def Leppard’s Hysteria record so much to a friend recently. I said something to the effect of, “On every song, you think you’ve gotten to the chorus, but then that part turns out to just be a pre-chorus, then you’re elevated to another chorus, but that, too, is just a prelude to the real chorus. It’s crazy!”

This happens throughout Hysteria. Apparently, when Def Leppard would present Mutt with a song, he’d veto the original chorus, and suggest they use it as a pre-chorus, and write a section after it that helped amp the song up more. They’d do that, and he’d suggest they write an even better part right after that. This resulted in songs like “Armageddon It,” where you experience a series of false choruses until you get to the real one, unless that one is just a post-chorus. It’s hard to tell. Either way, they link up beautifully.

See what I mean? I bet the “You can’t stop it,” part was their original chorus. They backed that up with the “Are you getting it?” bit (my favorite). Then they elevated the song further by throwing in the “Gimme all of your loving” section. But then we get yet another part that brings back the “Are you getting it?” line, but then supplements it with the song tagline, the call-and-response turn of phrase, “Armageddon it!”

Somehow Mutt and the band make all of this work together in a way that propels the song forward without collapsing under the weight of complication (Mutt Lange received co-writing credit on every song on the album). I’ve tried this approach in my own songwriting and, long story short, it’s really hard to pull off.

A Few Plugins to Help You Sound Like Mutt Lunge

Here are some of the plugins that I use to emulate some of techniques discussed above.

• Aly James LabVSDS-X (Simmons drum emulator)

• AudioThing Type A (Dolby noise reduction unit emulator)

• SoundToys Microshift (I use it as a way to get a pitched-down snare sound)

• Aurturia OB-Xa (a software emulation of a famous Oberheim synthesizer that I use for Mutt-style bass sounds; it’s probably not the same type he used, but it gets me where I want to go)

Best Mutt Lange Songs and Albums

• Def Leppard -Pyromania

• Def Leppard - Hysteria

• AC/DC - Highway to Hell

• AC/DC - Back in Black

• AC/DC - For Those About to Rock

• The Cars - Heartbeat City

• Shania Twain - Come On Over

• Shania Twain - Up

• Huey Lewis & The News - “Do You Believe in Love”

• The Records - Shades in Bed

• Bryan Adams - Waking Up the Neighbors

• The Corrs - “Breathless”

Closing Editor’s Note: for the purposes of this article, Mutt Lange’s work with hideous bands like Maroon 5 and Nickleback never happened.