In The Studio: Recording The Rolling Stones “Brown Sugar” Sessions

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.

So Mick’s was out in the room?

Yeah, it was out, set where I normally played. If you looked from the control room it was on the left side, about the middle, facing toward the front. You see, we had all these wonderful baffles, covered with burlap, with that pink insulation underneath.

We would corner off the sound with a couple of baffles up against each other. It would just knock the directness off, it took a lot of top end off.

So you could balance it out, but not stop leaking altogether.

Exactly, you couldn’t really snuff the sound out. It wasn’t as evident in the other mics, but it was there.

How did you mike the guitars?

On the guitar amplifiers, let’s see there were two different ones, on Mick’s I had a SM57, and then on the other I was using… I might have been using an RE15 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 20 dB 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.

How about the piano mics?

On the piano I was using only one mic, not two, so I had to move it around to find the hot spot. I’m going to have to think on that one. I think it was a U47, that was the other one, because three was all we had. And we used them all on every session. Jagger sang on a U47.

So the U47 on Jagger, that was a live vocal track? Or was it overdubbed?

I don’t think so, not unless he had to fix something in London. The only overdub I remember was the percussion that he did. He had mono earphones of course, and they were hearing what the board was hearing, they couldn’t get a separate mix.