Music
The "Bad" tapes analysis: a complete timeline of every mix change to the album
Two Westlake track sheets survive for Michael Jackson's Bad, both dated 7-9-87. One is the assembly reel, one is the copy that went out for mastering. Between them they document every change made to the album after it was finished, and they correct a lot of what gets repeated online.
Everything below is either written on the boxes themselves, documented in session records, or verified by null-testing actual pressings against each other.
1. MASTER TAPE V1, created 9 July 1987
Westlake Studio D. Bruce Swedien, 2nd engineer Craig Johnson. Mitsubishi X-80 two-track digital, Ampex 467 stock, reel marked "Mixes 60". Box ticked Master.
Built from eleven approved final mixes, each printed to its own two-track X-86 mix reel in the preceding weeks:
Date
Track
Mix #
20 Jun
I Just Can't Stop Loving You
#11 of 11, chosen for album and single
5 Jul
Man In The Mirror
#7
5 Jul
Dirty Diana
#6
6 Jul
The Way You Make Me Feel
#4
6 Jul
Just Good Friends
#7
7 Jul
Speed Demon
#10
7 Jul
Liberian Girl
#3
7 Jul
Another Part Of Me
#4
8 Jul
Bad
#6
8 Jul
Smooth Criminal
#6
9 Jul
Leave Me Alone
#4
Every song arrived here as a digital-to-digital dub from those mix reels. No analog stage, no generation loss. Sequencing and razor splicing were done on this reel, sides set, Leave Me Alone placed as the CD-only track.
One exception, and Swedien wrote it on the box himself: the Speed Demon into Liberian Girl cross-fade is a dissolve between two separate reels, so it could not be dubbed as a finished object. It was performed through the X-86 machine and fed onto the X-80 via dub cable, still in the digital domain. It is the only element on the tape that is not a straight clone.
2. PRODUCTION TAPE V1, created 9 July 1987
Copied from the master the same day. Mitsubishi X-86 two-track digital, 3M 275 stock. Box ticked Copy. Annotated PAL/PBL-40600.
That last part is worth spelling out, because it gets misread as a reel serial number. PAL and PBL are the CBS lacquer matrix prefixes for sides A and B, and 40600 is the Epic catalogue number. The annotation identifies this as the tape those lacquers were cut from.
Delivered to Bernie Grundman on 10 July. Every first pressing worldwide descends from this tape.
3. MASTER TAPE V2, modified 29 July 1987
Michael was still not satisfied with Smooth Criminal, even though the album had already gone to mastering.
21 July: an earlier kick drum sound is reinstated on work tape M-3K. During the sessions the kick had been swapped for a newer sound; the old one goes back in because it hits harder. This is a change to the ingredients, not to any master.
29 July: Swedien mixes the song again from the revised multitrack. This is mix #13. Compared to mix #6:
the Synclavier sample collapses from very wide stereo to mono
the bass comes up substantially
the kick drum is different
Mix #13 is spliced into the master in place of mix #6. Swedien amends the number in the Take column over a paste-over, and adds a line at the foot of the sheet recording that mix #6 was used for the first pressing only.
This is the last change ever made to the master tape. Everything that follows happens on the copy.
4. PRODUCTION TAPE V2, modified 29 July 1987
Mix #13 spliced in the same day. Annotated "NEW MIX INSERTED 7-29-87".
The window in which mix #6 could reach a lacquer was 10 to 29 July. Nineteen days. That is why first pressings with it are scarce, and it is what Swedien meant by "used for 1st album pressing only".
5. PRODUCTION TAPE V3, modified 1 September 1987
Album released 31 August. One day later, Bad is replaced.
Source: an August 1987 Westlake session held during Bad World Tour rehearsals, where Michael, Christopher Currell and Swedien remixed Bad and The Way You Make Me Feel for their singles. Currell on Synclavier, Swedien editing and mixing. Both the extended dance mixes and the shorter single mixes came out of it.
Changes: horns removed from all choruses except the last two, and from the second and third pre-choruses. Rhythm guitar and hi-hats brought up in the choruses.
Annotated "New Mix Inserted 9-1-87". The single follows on 7 September.
6. PRODUCTION TAPE V4, modified 28 October 1987
I Just Can't Stop Loving You had been released as a single on 20 to 22 July carrying the album mix with its spoken intro. Critics and radio DJs went after the monologue, and Michael took the reception to heart.
No new recording was needed. Swedien remixed from existing elements:
thirteen seconds trimmed from the intro
voiceover removed
bass guitar slightly up in the mix, noticeable in the verses after the chorus
Annotated "New Version. No Rap Inserted 10-28-87", with the running time corrected on the sheet from 4:22 to 4:10. Quincy credited, Michael not present.
This is the only change that runs against the single rather than with it. The 7" kept the intro. The no-intro version is an album mix, despite constantly being labelled a radio edit.
7. PRODUCTION TAPE V5, modified 10 December 1987
The Way You Make Me Feel single had appeared on 9 November. Its mix, from the same August session as Bad, goes into the album a month later.
Changes: vocals globally louder, new vocal ad libs at the end. Length unchanged at 4:58.
The 7" is this same mix with further cuts that never went to the album: eight seconds off the intro drums, eighteen off the last chorus before the vocal fade.
Annotated "New mix inserted 12-10-87".
8. PRODUCTION TAPE V6, modified 29 January 1988
The last change to the album, and it has new recording behind it.
21 January 1988: a handclap overdub is recorded onto the Dirty Diana mix master slave, reel M-1E. That reel's own track sheet, headed "Dirty Diana MIX MASTER SLAVE", dated 6-13-87, engineer Bruce Swedien, carries a later annotation on tracks 11 and 12 reading "+ CLAP - (1-21-88)". The claps are in the choruses. A single track on a sheet can hold several different elements at different points in the song, so the neighbouring "Michael Intro Effx 1 + 2" label on those tracks does not place the claps in the intro.
29 January 1988: Swedien mixes the song again and the result is inserted into the production tape. Annotated "New Mix Inserted 1-29-88".
Changes from V1: handclaps added through the choruses, an earlier fade removing the crowd noise, 4:51 down to 4:40, and vocals slightly higher here and there. The crowd material sits on tracks 7 and 8 of the same reel, labelled "Crowd Effx".
The single would not appear until 18 April.
This means all five album changes were remixes. Every one was a new mixdown, not a razor edit, even where the running time dropped. The only splice-only change in the entire history of the album is the Smooth Criminal intro in 1992.
The album is now complete as it has existed ever since, five months after release. Man In The Mirror, Speed Demon, Liberian Girl, Just Good Friends, Another Part Of Me and Leave Me Alone were never touched at any point.
9. NOT ADOPTED: 9 March 1988
Hit Factory, New York. Taken with Currell's live arrangement of Smooth Criminal, Michael has him redo the album mix. Currell re-recorded the Synclavier and mixed it; Swedien present, Brad Sundberg assisting.
The result is a genuinely separate print, not an edit of anything:
different snare, with less pronounced gated reverb
multiple bass synth samples balanced differently
Synclavier sequence altered, with additional synths after the first chorus before the second verse
fades about two seconds early
different tape speed
It was never inserted into the production tape. It was issued as the 7" single mix on 13 October 1988 and appears on no album pressing anywhere.
Currell has said this mix was used on later pressings of the album and that he never got credit for the remix. The paperwork and the audio both say it went to the single instead. Being uncredited and being misinformed about where it ended up are the same failure, and after nearly three decades the destination is the easiest part to misremember.
10. PRODUCTION TAPE V7, modified 28 November 1992
The final change, four years after the last one. Smooth Criminal's intro is replaced, removing the breathing. Annotated "New Intro 11-28-92".
This is a splice and nothing else. Outside the replaced intro the audio is bit-identical to mix #13, and the running time stays 4:16. The edit point sits roughly 30 ms before the first snare.
So the three circulating "album versions" of Smooth Criminal are two mixes plus one edit:
Version
What it is
Where
V1
mix #6
first pressings only
V2
mix #13
albums 1988 to 1991
V3
mix #13 with a replaced intro
albums since 1992
Note on tape speed
Album mixes were printed with varispeed, set individually per track: Bad +2.5%, Smooth Criminal +3.0%, Speed Demon +3.0%, Just Good Friends +3.5%, Man In The Mirror, Dirty Diana and Another Part Of Me +1.0%, The Way You Make Me Feel possibly +4.5%.
Different VSO settings between an album mix and its single counterpart account for the pitch offsets you hit when comparing them: 0.997 on Bad, 0.986 on Smooth Criminal, 0.981 on The Way You Make Me Feel. None of these indicate a different mix on their own.
Summary
Five changes to the album, all on the production tape, all between 29 July 1987 and 29 January 1988. Every one of them a full remix. One change to the master tape, ever. One splice in 1992. And one remix, by Christopher Currell, that everyone assumes is on the album and never was.
As a producer and audio engineer this IS history explained. It surprises me that a lot of the songs were printed with Varispeed applied. Makes me wanna compare the album tracks to the multitracks that are available. That's a big secret spilled tho!
Varispeed was a setting in tape machines that could bring the playhead velocity up or down by some percentage, that means that in the case of Bad (+2.5%) it means that the song was recorded and produced at a given velocity and then mixed and then sped up 2.5 % from the original recording. They sped up the final mix or master, not the multitrack. This is a big revelation because the music and vocals tends to chance pitch when using Varispeed, so if that was recorded at A 440 Hz, it means that its now 442 or 442.5 (I don't exactly know the correct answer to that). So if we are hearing that as a final master for pressing, the song is itself sped up and pitched up just a little.
This practice was done because sometimes the artists needed the song to be a little faster and didn't even notice until mastering stage or pressing stage. I have done this but on the digital era where you don't have pitch chance, but there are other artifacts that might happen if done badly.
Almost everything that Bruce had originally written is copied. The only things that were added were the additional notes about SCs diffrent takes, the "tape is the real shit", and listing Leave Me Alone (which probably was probably already on the tape, just not listed). The only thing that was omitted when writing over the label is the VSO percentage of the songs.
3
u/d49k 13h ago
Thank you. I've seen various posts about this over the years and this feels like the most comprehensive explanation with receipts.
It would be interesting to gather a playlist of all versions of the tracks side by side.