Alex Van Halen Strived For John Bonham Sound On New Album

07/17/2012
. (hennemusic) When Van Halen prepared to create "A Different Kind Of Truth," their first album with David Lee Roth in 28 years, they surrounded themselves with a new production team.

Grammy-winning producer John Shanks headed up the project, and engineer Ross Hogarth handled the mixing stage. Hogarth spoke with Guitar World about his role on the album. "Van Halen is a very three-dimensional band," explains Hogarth. "There are incredible dimensions to each and every aspect of the instruments, the people, the dynamics and the history. There are all these dimensions and you have to live inside of them. It's not a simple task of 'go mix a record.'"

"Starting with the sonics, Alex loves John Bonham's drums and wants his to sound like Led Zeppelin, but Led Zeppelin never had the amount of distortion and the amount of size and the guitars that Eddie has, so right off the bat, just getting the guitars to fit into a drum sound that sounds like John Bonham � because we all know that Alex is like the torch that John Bonham left, and there's an element to Alex that's like a mixture between Keith Moon, John Bonham and Elvin Jones or some jazz kind of thing. They're coming from the same place," Ross continues here.

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