It doesn't matter if it's the Stones or VH, the recording isolation requirements are similar.
Have a look at Jagger recording Sympathy with baffles all around him and headphones.
In the VHII photos we are supposed to believe that Dave is singing along like it's a karaoke night, right next to Ed's amp with no isolation, yeah right.
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The Stones are spread out with baffles isolating them.
For a amp on 10, it is often put in an iso room with the door shut like in the Brown Sugar session with Keith running a Fender Twin at max.
And the guitar amps?
Keith played a Fender Twin, and so did Mick Taylor, and they brought those in with them. The loudness on those tracks really came from Keith. I had it put in that back booth and shut the door on it.
On the guitar amplifiers, let’s see there were two different ones, on Mick’s I had a Shure SM-57, and then on the other I was using.. I might have been using an RE-15 on Keith. But I had a real problem with Keith because he was running a Fender Twin amp wide open, I mean that sucker was getting it.
I had a real problem with distortion going on, but I happened to remember that my maintenance guy, about a month before that, had left me a 20dB pad that he had made, a homemade pad, so I just stuck it in between. So I dropped that level before it hit the front of the Universal Audio and it saved the day.
Otherwise, I would have been hosed. I still thank God for that. I would have just been screwed. So on Keith’s amp, ‘oh no, I remember what was on his amp, an RCA 77DX, because I was having to get that level down any way I could, it was a ribbon mic.
With the pad and that RCA, I made it, just barely. A lot of that had to do with how it sounded, and I was always real pleased with that guitar sound.
I assume you close-miked the amps.
Yes, they were miked about two or three inches from the grille cloth, and with the Twins, we would get right in front of one of the two speakers. I’d make sure that both were working all right, and that one didn’t have a hole.
Well, Keith’s guitar amp was in a booth, and Jagger was in the back of the room with baffles around him. There was some leakage going on, but you couldn’t tell because he was so close to the mic.
It was part of the sound. The drums did not have a booth, they were open, but with baffles. But there was a lot of leakage on the drums, cymbals and stuff, even though he didn’t play real hard.
Really? But there’s a lot of impact in the drums on that song, more than on most Stones tunes.
Yeah, it’s that mic and the way we set it. Even today, that would be a good way for a rock band to mic their drums, if they like some great live drumming sound. They would be surprised to find that sometimes less is more. I think it would blow them away.
And the sound of Keith’s guitar is so good, and I really attribute it to that RCA DX77 with the pad, going into that Universal Audio tube console which warmed it up, too. Pretty wild, huh.
Did you use any compression on those tracks?
None. At the time, I did not have a compressor in the building. It was a couple more years before we had compressors. The only outboard gear was that 20dB pad, that’s all I remember.
What about board EQ? Did you use much of that?
Mostly, on all sessions, I would use one click or two on the highs to air it out. It was set at around 3 or 4K, with two dB steps; you could go to two or four. We had 100Hz for the low end, and I guess around 3500 for the high.
When we did the Stones sessions, we had a Universal Audio console with tube modules, the one with the big rotary knobs, knobs as big as your hand. We had ten inputs.
There was some fixed EQ on it, a fixed low end at 100Hz, and you could go two clicks of boost at two and four dB, and you could roll back to minus three.
But that’s all it was. It also had an echo send on it. Back then, we were using a live chamber.
I remember Barry Beckett saying he was sitting outside on the steps and could feel the building shaking.
Yeah, when they stated grooving around one in the morning, when I started the machines, it was an unbelievable thing; I have not experienced anything quite like that since.