Recreating a classic album???

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Love & Light

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Ok, our band is setting out on a little project to record a few demos at home (isn't that why we're all here!!). Some background info. before I start.....Our setup is vocals/backing vocals, lead guitar, rhythm acoustic guitar, bass and drums. We'll be using a firepod going into a laptop with Cubase software. We have a few SM 58's and a couple of decent condensors for drums/acoustic.

Heres the deal, I've been listening to the Rolling Stones album 'Beggars Banquet' flat out recently and I would love to try and recreate that type of sound on our demos. (Im not sure if the rest of the band feel the same but I can talk them into it!!).

Our style of style of music and some of the songs we're looking to record aren't a million miles away from the style that the Stones adopt on that album....a kinda murky, Southern blues, country feeling.

So, this is where I'd like to ask a favour! Does anyone have any recording tips/techniques that could help us try to recreate that album sound? e.g. mic placements, amps etc etc. I had heard a rumour that on one song the drummer actually keeps time using two telephone books.....not sure how much truth there is in that!!

We're pretty new to home recording so any help would be much appreciated!! (Although one of our band members is a well established member on this forum I believe.....Lurgan Liar....)

Many thanks!

http://www.captainkennedy.co.uk
http://www.myspace.com/captainkennedy
 
alright mate, check out mixonline.com its got a load of info on how some songs were engineered, not sure what's on there about the stones but im sure there will be something of use...just do a search.
 
Sounds like a great project with well defined notions and ideas.

Can't help you myself but wish you every bit of luck with your venture :)

Post your results here when you've finally got it nailed...
 
I don't know abour Beggar's Banquet, but if you like the sound of Exile on Main Street, rent a house in the south coast of france and turn it into a studio...then do heroin and drink a lot.
 
Haha! I wish (well except for the heroin that is!).

Thanks for the replies so far. gummblefish, I checked out that site, although there is nothing in particular relating to that album, it is a class site.

Anyone else have any ideas how best to get that "murky, Southern Blues, country" feeling into our recording?
 
I remember an interview with Keith Richards where he explains the sound they used (or at least the inspiration for the sound) on a couple tracks on that album - Street Fighting Man for one - was playing an acoustic guitar really close to a little cassette recorder's crappy built-in microphone to the point where it distorted a bit, taking a line out of the tape recorder to a speaker and then micing that speaker...
Like I say, I'm not sure if that's the ACTUAL sound you hear on the album, but it might be a fun experiment!
 
what amps, mics and other equipment are you using...also what are you tracking into? i would say get a nice room to track in first, dont worry too much about bleed...well to an extent. Also overdrive everything and swamp everything in reverb...if of course if it suits what you are doing...listen to parachute woman for that sound. Everything else on that album sounds really up close and in your face.
 
We'll be using a Marshall MG100DFX for electric, not sure what the bass amp is. Then we'll just be micing up the acoustic with a Studio Projects B1 and using the same mic for vox. Drums, we'll be using Shures for snare/toms etc and a couple of Behringer's for overheads. We'll be tracking into either a Roland 8-track machine or a Firepod.......if that all helps!!

Thanks for the suggestions so far. Its appreciated. Keep em coming!!!
 
If you really want to "re-create" the sound of a classic album, the recording gear is going to be a lot less important than the instruments, amps, playing style etc.

You could get every piece of recording gear used on a given classic album and not get anywhere close if your source sounds are not in any way similar to the ones on the album you are trying to emulate.
 
chizzy said:
I don't know abour Beggar's Banquet, but if you like the sound of Exile on Main Street, rent a house in the south coast of france and turn it into a studio...then do heroin and drink a lot.
Click to expand...

And don't forget to illegally hookup the power to the mobile studio or house
to the nearest railway!

Per the book "The Making Of Exile On Main Street" http://www.counterpunch.org/pollackexile.html

"After looking for a suitable place to record, the Stones decided to have a studio built in Nellcote's basement, ensuring that the often-elusive Richards would be accessible. The Stones had a mobile studio in a truck parked outside, which was later immortalized in Deep Purple's track "Smoke On The Water." In the midst of various electrical problems, Stones crew members illegally wired the electricity, so that it would bypass the meter at the house, and instead of using their own electricity, the power that was generated and that was used in the house and in the truck's mobile studio, came from a nearby railway, where the crew had hooked the line coming into the house"
 
About Exile, they used the railway line because the wiring in the old house could not take the demands. At least that what Wyman said in his book.
 
I don't know for sure, but a lot of bands from that period seem to have a distinct room mic sound about them. Perhaps try room micing and you'll get a bit more of a lo-fi density to your sounds...at least that's how I'd describe it, heh.
 
also try a lot of extreme panning..if you listen to a lot of records around theb, the seperation of each instrument is quite crazy. try listen to just one side at any point during a song, you'll see what i mean.
 
Also try long release times when compressing the drums, especially the overheads. Maybe try limiting yourselves to 8 tracks. That will have you thinking about efficiency, and you'll find that if you want say, backing vocals, you gotta give up that stereo overhead, and go with 1 mic for the top of the drum kit.
 
I was Jimmy Miller's engineer for a bit over 3 years during the 80's... needless to say we talked quite a bit about those recordings.

They were all different... Beggar's is different from Let It Bleed, which is different from Sticky Fingers which is different from Exile and Goat's Head Soup.

The things that were constant during those periods were Mick Taylor and Jimmy Miller. Mick doesn't like to talk about that period and Jimmy's dead so you're not going to get much from either.

Things to think about... open tunings [mainly open G]... percussion [Jimmy played most of it]. The band worked out most of the "feels" in the studio, Jimmy would let them go until he heard them get the 'feel' right... call the band into the control room and talk about anything in the world except the song... then they'd go back out in the room; one of the "Johns" brothers would "hit red" and they'd have the track.

There is a somewhat fascinating article in 'Tape Op' about "Brown Sugar" and a few other songs being cut at 'Muscle Shoals' in Alabama that is an interesting read.

The bottom line is that it wasn't "a studio" nor "mic techniques" nor basement's in France, nor mobile trucks, nor Heroin that got that sound to translate... it was great musicians providing great performances with this guy named Jimmy getting into eveyone's head and getting them to play a little better than they were capable of playing. I watched him do this I don't know how many times over the years I worked for him... it was inspiring to say the least.

I picked up a little bit of how to make that happen... but it's nothing that can be described in words... it just "is".

Sorry I couldn't be of better assistance with your quest... best of luck with all you do.
 
Cheers for all the replies so far in the thread. They have been a great help and have provided us with some great ideas.

And Fletcher, that was a great post. To work with someone like Jimmy Miller must have been unbelievable.
 
I have a great coffee table book of Michael Cooper's photos of the early stones. Keith did a commentary whilst looking at the photos, and they put it to paper. He talked a bit about making sure that everything sounded great before it ever got to tape. They would always ask "is that the tape? Or is that us?" I guess meaning 'how much messing around did you need to do to get it to sound like that?' If it wasn't almost 'pure sound' a lot of times they didn't want it on there. On certain albums anyway...
 
Seems to me that Beggars Banquet was made in the prime of tube recording
era. If I were to try and get that sound I would
drive tube pres pretty hard on the drums.............leave the acoustics nice and full and warm.I remember a clip where I saw a Senn 441 dynamic on the acoustic. Everything............... big and fat and in your face.The recordings are dark and murky for the most part but not in a bad way!!!!!!. If you are limited with your pres try getting a couple of GT Bricks and tube compressors and run through them at mix down. I assume you are using computer based recording and these records were made on tape machines and probably mixed on a tube 1/2 track Ampex. All that comes into the equation. Although it may sound lo-fi now..........it was not then. The Stones were rock royalty and recorded with the top stuff at the time. To me it is still a great sound!!!!!!!

Rico
 
Rico 52 said:
Seems to me that Beggars Banquet was made in the prime of tube recording era.
Click to expand...

With all due respect Rico you haven't got the remotest clue of what the fuck you're talking about.

Beggar's Banquet was made in Olympic Studios in London on the second deck made for Olympic by their tech at the time; Dick Swettenham. Dick Swettenham was subsequently bankrolled by Chris Blackwell [Island Records] to start the console manufacturing company called "Helios".

The desk at Olympic was 24 channels with 8 busses. The equalizer was a 3 band that featured a 10kHz shelf boost only, 6 selectable midrange frequencies [which were also boost only but switchable between "peak" (additive EQ) or "trough" (subtractive EQ)] with a 50Hz boost only feature on the low end or a stepped 12db per octave hi pass filter that had half a dozen positions and started as high as 400Hz [this is all from memory... I haven't seen one of these damn things in well over 10 years].

I actually owned the console for a while. Jimmy Miller was actually at my house when it showed up. There I was all proud of my latest purchase... and as we were rolling it off the truck Jimmy looked at me and said "that's my desk!!". I smiled and said "yes it is". He scowled and said "that thing was a piece of shit in 1968, what the hell would you want with it now?".

The desk ran on negative 24volt Germanium transistors and was quite noisey. Jimmy was right, the desk was a pig... and my options were to restore it to it's original glory or break it up and sell it for the bits. Part of the frame is holding up the pile of fire wood behind my house so I guess you can figure which direction I took.

Now... with all that nostalgia bullshit put to the side... let's talk about this horseshit toob fetish especially as it applies to the cheap toob crap you can find in your local Banjo Mart for mere pennies of what it should cost. OK, the Brick is somewhat of an exception as it's low price is a direct result of it being built where you could blindfold the assemblers with dental floss... but there's more to this "cheapassed tubemania" than using Chinese factories.

First... you guys need to understand that the people building "tube" stuff back in the day were going for the highest possible fidelity attainable... they were going for the lowest distortion possible, they were trying to get the stuff to sound "neutral". They were not going for the "toob" sound, they were trying to get away from the toob sound.

Now one of the nice things about tube circuits is that if they're designed well they'll have headroom for days [things that the cheapassed shit with glowy things inside... even "the Brick" doesn't have]. You're into D.W. Fearn and Thermionic Culture and Pendulum Audio and even Manley Labs before you're talking about real tube equipment... that TL Audio bullshit doesn't make the grade.

One of the other things that you really have to understand about tube equipment is that the majority of "the sound" was created by the 'phase shift' as well as the 'ringing and overshoot' of the transformers involved in the circuits. It wasn't necessarily the tubes [though they did add some musically pleasing distortions and a little natural tube compression when driven... but I'm not writing 15,000 words on the subject so let's just leave it at most of "the sound" you're hearing is transformers... not the tubes].

Desks like the Olympic desk were also chock full of pretty cool transformers [which they haven't gotten close to recreating in the current "Helios reissue" crap]... as was Neve stuff from that era, and Raindirk stuff from that era, and MCI stuff from that era, and API stuff from that era, and Sphere, and even Soundcraft [who at one time made a pretty outstanding sounding console called the Series One which is about the last desk they built that was actually worth a flying fuck from a sonic perspective].

Yes, the Stones could afford whatever they wanted from a technical perspective... which is why they had state of the art stuff like this custom Olympic desk [which just happened to be attached to one of the coolest sounding rooms in London that just happened to be in Olympic Studios]... and 3M M-56 16 track machines [also transistor machines... but 'class A/discrete' and also full of (gasp) really good sounding transformers].

Look Rico... I know it looks like I'm ragging on you a bit... probably because I am, but really I'm ragging more on the bullshit half truths and horseshit myths that incompetent know nothing jag offs who write for jag off magazines because they can't get a real gig or worse work as a floor mook in the local Banjo Mart so they can use their employee discount to buy themselves some of that there cool assed toob gear so they can sound just like that Lenny Kravitz fellow.

Dude... don't believe the bullshit... believe your ears. Learn basic electronic theory, learn music theory, learn about rhythm and harmony... learn about harmonic structure and phase shift and shit like that and all of a sudden you'll find yourself making way better recordings than if you listen to some fucking moron who can spew dumbass hype about some cockamamie half truths he learned from someone only slightly less dumb than him.

Best of luck with all you do... and please pay the morons no mind. Listen for yourself and the world will really open itself up to you in ways you never imagined.

Peace.
 
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