Did you have a mic on the bass amp?
Yes, the bass guitar mic was an RCA 44. We didn’t have direct back in those days.
How much separation could you get in that studio?
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 20 dB 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 4 kHz, with two dB steps; you could go to two or four. We had 100 Hz for the low end, and I guess around 3,500 (Hz) for the high.
I remember Barry Beckett saying he was sitting outside on the steps and could feel the building shaking.
Yeah, when they started 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.
If you compare “Brown Sugar” to other cuts done by Glyn Johns at about same time, most came out on “Let It Bleed,” you don’t get that kind of room sound. They have that clean separation, you don’t get the feeling of the whole room being pumped up by the music.
Right. You get the same thing from those old Motown records, cut at Hitsville USA in Detroit. When they moved to LA it all changed, they never had that wonderful sound again. I don’t understand how they could divorce it that way. But I love that sound, and the old Philly Studio, Sigma Sound and all the great records done by Gamble and Huff, God they were great!
Yeah, but up in Philly, they were probably saying, “How can we get that funky sound they have down there in Muscle Shoals?”
Oh, we didn’t even think about that. I suppose the grass is always greener somewhere else.