STAX Studios..

[Superfunk]

το ειχα αναφερει και παλια αλλα μια και προσφατα κανουμε πολυ κουβεντα για...επαγγελματικες ηχογραφησεις και στουντιο ας δουμε ΠΟΥ & ΠΩΣ γραφτηκε η καλυτερη ισως μουσικη που μας εδωσε η Αμερικη ποτε.

 

http://www.sl-prokeys.com/stax/stax-session.htm

[matawan]

Right on brother :)

 

"Here's another thought about STAX rhythm sessions ..... I believe repeated rehearsal of anything really takes away some of the spontaneity.  STAX sessions were beautifully unplanned - you walk in, and had no idea what was going to be cut today.  You'd never heard the songs before, and most of the time, had no idea who the artist would be.  You learned one, went over it for maybe 5 or 10 minutes, cut it, and that was it - on to the next song.  Wipe your memory clean, and move on to the next song.  Because there was no written music, the freedom to play what you felt carried the song.  You can believe this - rhythm players like Duck, Al, and Steve were just plain absolute magic."

 

 

 

 

 

[Superfunk]

& μερικα αλλα απιστευτα quotes...

 

"We didn't use cymbals much; it was almost taboo to use a lot of cymbals. We didn't like the high end; we thought it offended the female buyer."

 

"The "Funky Memphis" drum sound was probably several things. As far as the drums actually recorded in Stax, of course the biggest part of the sound would have been Al Jackson, Jr., or in some cases, Willie Hall ("second string drummer from The Bar-Kays, later with The Blues Brothers). Secondly, the drums of course were important. Al used a Rogers kit mostly, and a Ludwig 400 snare. Those snares are amazing. The Stax drums were recorded in a pretty small drum booth. Al didn't have a lot of extra room in there. Also, that would mean very little "room" sound as we know it today. Mic'ing was pretty minimal. Usually a KM-84 (NEVER a 184, please, they are not the same!) on snare, but not as close mic'd as normal today. Perhaps about 5-8" and pointing at the snare. The hat was almost never mic'd. One or two 87's or 67's (usually one) would have captured the "rest of the kit" most of the time. The bass drum might have an RE-20 on it, or on occasion, either the snare or bass drum might have an RE-15 or a Shure 545. That's about it. Usually, bass guitar (mostly passive transformer direct), bass drum and snare were tracked together on track one, the "rest of the drums" on track two, and then the other music on any other tracks. The console (never any outboard pre's) was either a Fluckinger or a Spectrasonics, and recording would have been to Scully machines.

 

At Hi Studio, where they did Al Green and some other great ones, the drummer was....Al Jackson again! The setup was somewhat similar, although the console distorted quite a bit, and there was always a conga player playing along (Howard Grimes), "doubling" the bass drum and snare, and playing fours and eights. This is what gave the Al Green drums the sound of a "tom-like thing" on the snare. The drums there were not in a booth, but were pretty well surrounded by tall, dead baffles.

 

At the old Ardent, we had a drum riser-booth at first, about 2-3 feet off the floor, with "walls" built around it extending upwards about another 4-5 feet, the front wall having some plexiglass. We used this a while, but then took it down later, and put the drums in a corner of the room, usually with about 4 foot baffles around them. Console there was Spectrasonics, and machines again Scully, until we went 16 track, which was a 3M.

 

The drums, esp snare, were tuned pretty low, and were quite deadened. We almost always put the drummer's wallet on the snare drum. It would "jump up" when the drum was struck, providing a little "sound," and then fall right back down (gravity, I think!), deadening it again so that the ring was not very long at all. Rarely were toms hit. Almost everything was the bass drum, snare and hat (which wasn't mic'd).

 

I spent a lot of time over at Hi in the later Al Green years. Willie's studio was an old theater (Royal) with big sagging reams of burlap hanging from the ceiling stuffed with fiberglass batting, carpet over the floors, dead as a door-nail. I cant remember what was on the kick or snare as far as mics go, but he had a bunch of U67's and there was usually one as an over-head, maybe centered about 3 ft. over the rack toms. The kick was probably an old EV that had the nick-name "Donkey Dick" as thats's kinda what it looked like. Console/pre's were a custom Bell Lab's job built in the easrly 60's, tape machine was a 1" Ampex 8-track with 351 tube electronics, tape machine ran at 14.5 ips (no shit, we found this out later moving some tapes to another studio) and monitoring was done on Altec A7's. I don't think Wiliie ever used any EQ and what he had was a simple shelving bass/treble, simple mic setups/placement was what he understood. Mixing was through a panel that had level, left/right/center switch and output was so low from from this panel that it had to go into the mic inputs of the Ampex 2-track.

 

Willie was no engineer  :o in the repect that he did not understand electronics, signal flow, blah, blah, blah..... What he did understand was music, what sounded good and he understood it better than most anybody else, How many people know that he studied at Julliard.

 

My dad was Willie's mastering engineer for all the Al Green stuff and until "Let's Stay together" there was no EQ on any of the masters. "Let's stay to Together" had +2 db @ 5k from a Spectrasonics 2-band EQ, soft-limiting from a strapped pair of 1176LN's, a couple of db @ 4:1 and a Pultec hi/lo pass filter @ 70hz and 12k for the 45 and a vertical cross-over @ 250 hz. The low/hi pass and the x-over were always in the chain to protect the cutterhead/limit lateral excursion. All masters cut on a Scully/Westrex system, Neumann could'nt handle the heat.

 

 

"A lot of the drum sound was, I think, accidental. You know, bring the drums in and put a mike on 'em. Move the mike around till it sounds good.

 

What a lot of people probably don't understand is that the drums Al played, stayed there 24 hours a day, 365 days a year with the same microphones on them. It was that way for a long time, when we were cutting all the mono records, "Green Onions," the Rufus Thomas stuff and all of that. Once they were there, it never changed, they never moved around any. Later, when we got into multi-track machines and overdubbing, some things changed.

 

The other thing is that Al Jackson never changed his heads, unless he broke one. The same thing with the bass and guitar. If we broke a string we changed it, if we didn't, it never got changed.

 

Al never changed those drums. I think he had a Ludwig and Rogers combination, kind of a mix 'n' match. He had a medium size kick drum, 20-inch I believe, and he had a Rogers floor tom, grey pearl, and then a little 12-inch tom over head. It was a little black drum.

 

The other thing that Al used to do that was different-he wasn't the only drummer that ever did it- but when he came down to do a session, the first thing he did was reach in his back pocket, and pull out this big fat billfold and plop it on the snare. Other guys used tape or a muffler. Al just plopped a billfold down there. The old records didn't have a lot of decay time, the snares didn't ring too much and there's not a lot of cymbals, because we didn't mike the cymbals.

 

Where were the mikes placed?

 

We had an RCA capsule mike, a 44 or a 77, that looked like a big Tylenol. We had one of those on a small stand and we just brought it right straight up under the hi-hat, as high as we could to still be comfortable. It was a ribbon mike and it picked up everything around it and got the snare and the hi-hat. Then we had the old, big, black and chrome RCA microphone. It had big holes in it and they used them back in the old days in the radio shows. Sort of a giant shaver microphone about four inches wide. We used that for a long time on the kick drum. That's all we had, two mikes.

 

Was there a front head on the kick drum?

 

Yes, there was. Way later, when Ronnie Capone and some of those guys came over we may have taken it off. They grew up doing jingles and they turned us on to some new techniques.

 

We had two Ampex mixers. We had eight channels but one of them we used as an echo return, so we only had seven to cut all those songs with. Two mikes on the drums, one on the vocal, one on the horns, one on the bass, one on the guitar and one on the piano. The studio was a theater, as you know, and we used one of the tile bathrooms for the echo.

 

The ceiling was 12 to 13 feet high near the box office entrance and went up to 20-something feet down near the front of the stage where the instruments were set up. The floor was slanted but it started levelling off about half way down, right about where we had the drum riser."