Recording - August 2017 - 20

CHRIS
S TA PL E T O N
Live From Studio A
his own. I found another one on Ebay and
bought it for him. He still uses it to this day.

Dave said that on a lot of the tracks,
the drums were in a booth but you
opened the door...

Yeah, that didn't work. [laughs] We did
leave the door open on the last record.
On this record, what we did was: before Chris or anyone else came in, I'd get
there early, I'd build a drum mix, and send
it to a monitor speaker out in the tracking
room and then record that through the
R88. It put a little bit of the drums in the
room, and put everybody together.
Sometimes, I would do that with the
guitar too; I'd re-amp the guitar back
through the studio monitors into the room.
On one track, "I Was Wrong," you can
hear that clearly. The drums and guitar
were played at the same time, but they
weren't in the room, and this puts them
in there with the rest of the band. A bit of
sleight-of-hand, if you know what I mean.

Not many of our readers will have
experience with the instruments you
overdubbed, harmonica and pedal
steel. Can you explain how you
tracked those?

Robbie Turner's pedal steel took a pair
of 421s and that's it. He won't let us use
anything else. His amp is mono, but with
two speakers I set up the two mics on the
two speakers to get a stereo-ish track, and
added a little plate reverb for some width.

For harmonica, do you use the traditional [Shure 520DX] "Green Bullet"?

That's a funny story. A few years ago, I
was doing Willie Nelson's 80th birthday
at Third Man Records and I was telling
Mickey [Willie's harmonica player] that
I'd found this microphone that I really
liked, this weird Ampex mic. He tried it out
and then he said he had to have one of
20

RECORDING August 2017

Do you go direct with the mic or run
it through an amp and mic it?

He uses this tiny amp that sounds great
and we'll take a DI out of the amp, which
is actually a really good sound. I'll mic
the amp, and then I'll mic the harmonica
itself, a bit above his head. I'll blend those
into one or two tracks. Most of what you
hear on this record, like on "Last Thing
I Needed", that's just a 67 up above
Mickey's head, acoustically picking him
up. On "Second One To Know", he plays
through his amp.

You mixed the album as well... did
you do that back at your studio?

No, we did the whole record at RCA,
and we kind of mixed as we went using
quite a bit of the API console. I also built
a monitor mix for everybody in Pro Tools
and ran that through a 32-Channel summing bus made by Jeff Steiger of Classic
Audio Products of Illinois, so we could get
the tone of the console in the monitor mix.

Cool, so everyone heard the sound
of the album as it was being made.

When we were done tracking, I flipped
it and put the [monitor] mix that I made in
Pro Tools up on the desk. The drums were
the first eight channels: stereo room, kick,
snare, stereo toms, stereo overheads.
Channels 9-16 were two channels of
bass (9-10), two channels of harmonica
and pedal steel (11-12), and two channels of keys (13-14)-there's piano and
organ on some tracks that will be released
on Volume 2. Channels 15-16 were for
Chris' overdubbed solos or lead guitars.
17-24 were for Dave's guitar (17-18),
two for Chris' main guitar (19-20), two for
Chris' vocals with effects (21-22), and two
for Morgane's vocals with effects (23-24).
We brought it all back into the console in

these sets of stereo pairs, with just a little bit
of EQ here and there. I did all the effects
and automation in Pro Tools using the Pro
Tools VCAs and a Euphonix Artist Mix.

I really loved the reverb on Chris'
voice. Is that a plug-in, or did you
use the real plate at RCA?

A couple of songs on the record, like "Last
Thing I Needed", that was the RCA plate.
That plate's mono, so I did two passes, printing the vocal through the plate, and I used a
Fulltone tape echo as a predelay, with slightly different settings for left and right. There's
also some vocal run just through the Fulltone
delay and printed twice.
Then a lot of the record is the Fulltone into the Waves Abbey Road plate;
we found a patch that we really liked,
a tweaky little weird sound. And then
there's a free plug-in called Tape Echo
that comes with Pro Tools 12. The user
interface looks like a Maestro Echoplex. I
found that if you crank the input level way
up, it kind of sounds like my Fulltone. It's
not as good, because it's not as random,
but it meant that I didn't have to recall
things from song to song, so I could go
through the mixes fast. I used that a whole
bunch on the record.

I like the fact that while you do
these very rootsy, old-school records
with folks like Chris and Jack White,
you're still a big proponent of plugins and what they can do.

Between the real RCA plate, the UA
EMT 140 plate (which is all over the
record on drums and some backing
vocals), and the Abbey Road plate, it's
a whole mishmash. For example, on
"Death Row", that's the real plate being
driven by my Fulltone with really long
echoes, like 200 ms of delay or more,
and I adjusted the blend so the plate
would happen, then an echo, then an
echo in the plate. I tweaked on that for

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