from reverb

“High-Tech and Hand-Made”: Peter Gabriel Shares His Recording Philosophy | Bacon’s Archive

I interviewed Peter Gabriel in summer 1989 at his Real World studio at the old Box Mill near Bath in south-west England. Passion, his accompanying soundtrack album to Martin Scorsese’s movie The Last Temptation Of Christ, had just appeared, and his most recent solo album at the time was So, released three years earlier.

Up in his office in the admin block at Real World, surrounded by bookshelves, boxes, tapes, paintings, some ethnic drums, and a great long table cleared for work, we set out on a wide-ranging conversation. We covered the creation of Real World, his attitude to songs and composition, the importance of food when recording world music, and more. But we began with some instrumental memories.

What instrument did you first learn to play?

Drums. I’d always wanted to play drums. And I still think that’s the best way for any musician to start, because if you can get drums right, you get feel. And the rest is downhill. Because I hear a lot of musicians trained up to the eyeballs who haven’t got the feel right, particularly the English players [laughs] when they’re trying to get laidback and it doesn’t quite sit. But if you can learn that on drums, to focus only on rhythm and phrasing and accent, then that’s I think the centre of any musical language.

Before you sort of learn bad habits, if you like, play along with great rhythms, and enjoy rhythm, because there is something to do with just letting go, I think. And the most extreme form of physical release in music is percussion and dance, and if you get comfortable with that, then as you develop… [he stops mid-sentence]. But I’m talking as if I’m a great player. I’m not. I’m a very primitive keyboard player. But I enjoy what I do and it feels right for me.

Peter Gabriel, 1973

So your advice for anyone starting out is to explore rhythm?

It is—well, that and a few things. I think persistence is worth more than talent [laughs] in terms of achieving results. Because in a sense I think people are born talented and they tend to limit themselves. Some will find it easier than others, but music and art are just languages that anyone can learn, and no one should be discouraged because they don’t feel good enough.

If they are determined enough, I think it’s possible to make something work. So it isn’t so much a question of denying talent, but just encouraging people to maximize what they’re capable of. And what actually determines that is their will and persistence, both in working on the writing and instruments, and particularly in selling your goods at the end of the day.

How did you get on when you were trying to sell your goods in the early days?

I used to be the guy hawking the Genesis tapes around the record company offices. I’d hang around in reception, and that would be as far as I’d ever get. I’d try sort of winking at the receptionist, usually to no avail. It needs… [laughs] well, it needs a certain iron will to survive.

Thick-skinned is the expression that comes to mind.

Yeah. We had a couple of guys who sat us down in their office and took an hour of their very valuable time to tell us to give up and go back to Brick Lane [east London] or wherever we crawled out of. Really discouraging, and quite malicious, I thought. But it happens a lot, I think, and you need to be able to fight for your music.

I had this friend at the time I was hawking my tapes around, and they said no, you’ve got it all wrong. He took me into Warner Brothers, and having found out the name of the managing director, he said to the receptionist—it was lunchtime, the timing was important—he said, I forget who it was, but something like, “Is Tony back from lunch?” So the receptionist thinks, Ah, friends of the MD. Straight to his office. Cup of tea, plate of biscuits [laughs]. And then the MD comes back from lunch and finds this bunch of wallies in his office. But he sort of admired the cheek sufficiently to give us a listen. If you could locate the people you were aiming at, and make sure you made contact with them, person to person, they’d eventually listen, if only to get rid of this pest.

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from reverb

It’s great news. Your band got a gig somewhere near the foot of a festival bill. It’s your chance to play to the biggest audience you’ve yet faced. But hold on—you’ve never actually played on a festival stage before, and the adrenaline rush of a golden opportunity starts to dilute as it dawns on you and your fellow band members that you’re right back to where you were when you began playing live. You don’t really know where to start.

Who does the sound? How will they handle your unique brand of whatever it is that makes you future headliners? What about the drummer’s problems with the kit? What about the bass amp not being 100% reliable? What if you won’t even be using your own gear? All these and so many more questions.

We asked two veteran sound engineers and tour managers, Bryony October and Mark Portlock, for their advice. Bryony has over 20 years experience working with top bands and artists, including Snow Patrol, Laura Marling, Foxes, and Billy Ocean. She is currently FOH (front of house) engineer for the multi-platinum-selling singer Katie Melua, the singer-songwriter Natalie Merchant, and the UK country duo Ward Thomas, as well as up-and-coming singer Lily Moore, daughter of the late Gary Moore.

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from reverb

I’ve interviewed Jeff Beck a number of times, and we did this one in 2005 for my first book about Telecasters (Six Decades of the Fender Telecaster). Naturally enough, we concentrated on Jeff’s use of Teles and Esquires, which predated his later moves to Les Pauls and, later still, to Strats.

We settled down in the kitchen of his 16th century Sussex pile for a cup of tea and a good chat about Yardbirds guitars, Jimmy Page‘s birthday present, and Seymour Duncan’s Tele-Gib, among quite a few other things.

Jeff, you told me once that your first Fender was a Strat you bought in 1961, when you were about 16, on HP [credit]. And I think you sold that to buy a car?

I think I did, yeah [laughs]. I think I got a phone call saying there’s a Strat in London, and I’d get on the train, which is something I never would have dreamed of doing—I’d never even get a bus—so I found my way to Charing Cross Road, all on my own, looked at this guitar, and dreams floated off into the distance [laughs]. I actually saw it, touched it, and that was enough.

I had a catalogue way before then, which I used to look at, an American from Fender when it was in Fullerton. I always remember it was on a ritzy looking paper, and I always thought these guitars have got to be about a thousand quid, and then I found out they were only £147—and even then I thought well, I can see myself being able to get hold of the money, if I sold everything I had.

In the end, I got it on HP. It was a 1960 sunburst, didn’t have a vibrato arm, and I painted it pink, or lavender. I sold it back to the… I remember it was split in two, this big split appeared along the back of it. I’d whacked something with it. So on the train as I went to sell it, I touched it up with my girlfriend’s nail varnish. It matched perfectly. Fantastic story, eh? And they never spotted it.

All the [Gene] Vincent Blue Caps guys had matching white Strats, so I had to have one of those—I had to have a Strat. My rhythm guitarist [John Owen, in Beck’s first proper band, The Deltones] actually had the first Fender. He had a Telecaster, a few months before I could even afford a down payment to put on a Strat.

So I would ogle this thing. I spent more time playing it than he did! He put everything in motion to try and get me to get the Strat so I wouldn’t keep nicking his guitar all the time. And eventually I ended up with that Tele.

Talking about the Strat for a moment—I can’t imagine what that guitar must have looked like to people when it first appeared in the mid-’50s.

Well, you know, the reason I left school was because of that [laughs]. I mean that is brain damage when you’re a kid of 14 and you see that—it’s just a piece of equipment that you dream about touching, nevermind owning.

The first day I stood in Lew Davis or one of them shops [in central London] I just went into a trance. I got the wrong bus home, just dreaming about it, you know? It just blew my brains apart, and it’s never been any different since. The Futurama never even was a threat. Even when I was 15, I used to look at the Futurama with great disgust—it was like the Woolworth’s version of the Strat.

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guitar world

Ode to Jeff Beck: Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Vince Gill, Steve Stevens and more on why he’s the guitar hero’s guitar hero

By David Von Bader a day ago

Some of guitar’s greatest names on Beck’s influence, praising his mastery of the space between the notes and relentless pursuit of innovation

If you’ve spent almost any time at all immersed in guitar culture, you’ve undoubtedly realized that our guitar universe runs on idolatry. Guitarists need heroes. We crave inspiring figures to learn from – characters whose sounds and aesthetics we can analyze, fuse together and incorporate into our own identities as players. 

We’re a deeply reverent bunch that love signature- model gear, copping iconic licks as accurately as possible (Thank you, YouTube!) and partaking in the endless hunt for tones that recall the sounds of our favorite records. 

And while the concept of the guitar hero is as old as rock ‘n’ roll itself, new heroes arrive for each new generation – with only the most remarkable players earning an immunity to the sands of time, capable of wielding influence over generation after generation after generation.

Among the proverbial High Court of Living Guitar Gods, Jeff Beck stands tall as the player other greats seem to most commonly point to when asked who they believe to be a truly worthy of the title. So we’re just gonna go ahead and say it: Jeff Beck is the guitar hero’s guitar hero.

Throughout a monastic life of guitar playing and a career chiefly marked by perpetual reinvention, Beck has provided seemingly infinite innovation on the instrument. Combining an otherworldly, fluid, dynamic touch, brilliant melodic sensibilities and a holistic approach that uses every last bit of a guitar, Beck’s playing is something that, at its best, transcends the instrument altogether. 

It becomes a disembodied voice screaming out from the bowels of a Marshall, a mythical Siren escaping the guts of a Strat only by the will of a tricky finger flicking a volume knob. The man can be seen applying chalk to his hands before he plays, but the chalk might as well be magic pixie dust, because there really is no other worldly explanation for the raw emotional content Beck can dredge from a guitar. 

We could go on waxing poetic here – and we all know how much guitarists love hyperbole – but we’ve decided to do you one better and got some bonafide guitar heroes to make the point for us.

Gathered here to celebrate the true champion of the guitar that is Jeff Beck are noted players pulled from varied genre and generation, all titans of the instrument in their own right. 

Our panel includes Steve Vai, Steve Stevens, Vince Gill and Joe Satriani, plus relative newcomers Tyler Bryant of Tyler Bryant & The Shakedown and Bones UK guitarist Carmen Vandenberg, who shared electric guitar duties with Beck on his latest studio album, 2016’s Loud Hailer, an album that she also helped write. 

While their respective voices on the instrument are unique and diverse, every member of our panel is bound by deep admiration for the great innovator from Wallington, England, a fellow who’s changed the game time and time again. And who knows what 2020 will bring?!

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from Reverb

“When you go into a studio you’re trying to figure out a way to create the best impression of who you are,” says Steve Rosenthal, recalling his first professional recording experience. “I thought, ‘Well I’m 20 years old, if I’ve got to spend a lot of time in a place, this seems like an interesting place to spend some time.”

As the owner of The Magic Shop recording studio, Rosenthal spent the last three decades helping artists like Lou Reed, Coldplay, David Bowie, Arcade Fire, Norah Jones, and countless others present their own best impressions of themselves. More recently, running MagicShop Archive & Restoration Studios, he’s helped to usher in improvements on classic recordings by The Rolling Stones, Blondie, Elvis Presley, Woody Guthrie, and others, as well as digging into some legendary artists’ unreleased archives.

Rosenthal got his start in the mid ’70s as an engineer at A1 Sound in New York City, owned by Herb Abramson, co-founder of Atlantic Records. “I had to record the Atlantic Records way,” Rosenthal recalls. “You could only have three microphones on the drums… all the records that I engineered when I was at Herb’s place were sort of R&B records with large bands… and it would pretty much all happen at once. It was really trial by fire.”

With partner Gary Dorfman, Rosenthal opened NYC studio Dreamland in the late ’70s, recording tons of the punk and new wave bands that were popping up all over town at the time, and even starting one of his own, TV Babies, as well as his own label, Rockin’ Horse Records. In 1984 Rosenthal parted ways with Dorfman and went off on his own, working at several different New York studios and building up a solid clientele. During this period he did his first archival/restoration work on The Rolling Stones’ catalog through their former manager/producer Andrew Loog Oldham.

It was in 1987 that Rosenthal finally opened The Magic Shop downtown on Crosby Street. “I wanted to get a place with high ceilings,” he relates, “because I wanted good drum sounds, and that led me down to SoHo, which was incredibly funky at that point. It was still transitioning from an industrial neighborhood that was leaving and an arts neighborhood that was growing.”

Rosenthal made a crucial decision to build his studio around a mighty but disregarded piece of equipment. “I really wanted to have a vintage Neve,” he says. “I loved the sound of those early 1067s, 1079s, those Neve mic pres. In those days, they were destroying the vintage Neves—they would break them up and just keep the mic pre’s, because everybody wanted to use SSLs. I’ve never been a big SSL guy. So I went to England and I went on a Neve hunt to try to find a vintage console.”

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Fender’s Don Randall Offers Revisionist Take on Leo, CBS, and the Company’s Early Days | Bacon’s Archive

I interviewed Don Randall in 1992, when I was researching my first book about Fender. In the beginning, Don had worked for Fender’s distributor, Radio-Tel, but in the early ’50s he joined Fender as the head of sales, staying there until a few years after CBS’ takeover in 1965.

I met Don at his office in Tustin, California, and spent a couple of enjoyable hours chatting about the old days, necessarily concentrating on his view from the business side of Fender—and, in particular, discussing the controversial CBS purchase.

Sitting in his wood-paneled office, he looked to me a little like an aging astronaut—sleek, tanned, and self-assured. He certainly helped take Fender into the stratosphere.

Would it be a fair comment, Don, to say that Leo Fender was the driving force behind the Fender company?

Well, no, it wouldn’t be. Leo was a very introverted individual. He of course has taken credit for inventing the solidbody guitar, which really isn’t true. Paul Bigsby was actually the guy that came out with the solidbody guitar with the lute head and so on. That pre-dated Fender’s guitar, and prior to that when Leo was messing around [at K&F], a fellow by the name of Doc Kauffman was the important driving force.

I hope you’ll take this in the manner in which it is intended, because Leo’s gone now [he died in 1991, a year before this interview], and I don’t mean to put him down. But there’s been so much misinformation about these things, I think it’s time that someone put the record straight.

That’s one of the reasons I came to see you, because I’ve read so many conflicting reports about what happened. So tell me how it all began.

My time with Leo goes back before World War II. I operated a small radio wholesale house, selling parts and equipment, and Leo had a little radio repair shop and a service station, over on Spadre, which is now Harbor Boulevard [in Fullerton]. I sold him radio parts and so on. We had a very good association. He had a wife, Esther Fender—a lovely lady, very beautiful—she was keeping the books, and she worked for the phone company.

That went for on for, oh, I don’t know how long, and finally of course I had to go in the army. I spent almost three years in the service. Leo during that time wasn’t in the service because he had only one [working] eye. He wasn’t taken in. During that time he expanded his radio service business because—well, during that period there weren’t too many people about to do that kind of business.

When I got out of the service, I came back and started doing business with Leo again, selling parts and equipment. That went on for a while, and by that time he and Doc Kauffman had some falling out on these things. I didn’t ever know exactly the reason for Doc’s separation from Leo, but it seems that he had family problems that meant he was afraid to carry on with the business. But Doc was a very nice guy.

At the same time, Leo had a fellow by the name of Ray Massie working for him, who was actually beginning to build some amplifiers, and Leo would go out to the country-and-western places locally, take ’em out and let them play ’em. This led to Leo first of all making a little tiny steel guitar. We started selling those at Radio and Television Equipment Company [Radio-Tel] because we were doing business with Leo at the time.

Was Radio-Tel your company?

No, that was owned by a man name of Francis Hall. I was the general manager there. Leo and Francis really didn’t get along. They just rubbed each other the wrong way. We had another fella selling for us in the south, by name of Charlie Hayes—this was in 1953. We formed that year the [Fender Sales] company, and the four of us became partners. I was the managing partner, plus Leo, Charlie Hayes, and Francis Hall.

That went on for a little while, and the antagonism in the company was such that I felt like a referee. Charlie and I were doing one thing, and Leo and Francis another. So then in 1955, Leo and Charlie and I were on a phone hook-up, Charlie was over at the factory—I think it was in April, if I’m not mistaken. It was about six o’clock at night, just before it was getting dark, and Charlie said he had to get home, Dorothy had dinner waiting for him. That was from Fullerton to Santa Ana.

I got a call, couldn’t have been more than 30 minutes later I don’t think, and Charlie had been killed by a head-on car accident on State College Boulevard, which then became Raymond where the factory was. So that left Francis, Leo, and me in the company.

How old was Charlie when he was killed?

He would have been in his late 30s, I guess. He’d been in the service also. Anyway, this animosity continued to grow, and Francis bought the Rickenbacker company, and that sealed his fate there. We decided we couldn’t have him in the company, so we made him a buy or sell offer, which he felt he couldn’t handle, so we bought his interests.

The company became Leo and myself, and it continued in that vein until we sold it to CBS in 1965. During that time a lot of things transpired, and a lot of people became involved, and now they all want to say they had a stamp on the company, which absolutely wasn’t true. It didn’t happen.

Who were the most important people at Fender in those early days?

Well, Leo and myself were the only real principals in the company. Everyone else was hired hands, you might say. Forrest White was very active in running the factory, and he was very good at it, a very efficient operator. The rest of them—Dale Hyatt, George Fullerton, all the rest of them—have indicated we did this, we did that. They really had nothing to do with the company at all. They were hired hands and had no influence on the company or its designs or anything about it.

Presumably, Don, Leo was happy for you to take care of the business matters?

Well, I remember once when Leo and I were involved in a tax case—they took our personal tax situations and our companies’ tax situations and brought them all into one. So we had to go to a tax court up in LA. Leo was really funny in lots of ways. He was such a strange guy. So we were up there, and Leo was on the stand, and the tax attorney was cross-examining him. And everything was “I don’t know,” “I don’t remember,” “I don’t know.” You could see the guy was getting more and more frustrated with this.

Leo actually didn’t know anything about the business when it came right down to it—but he knew more than he let on. Finally, the guy was exasperated, having just run some figures by him that Leo should have known about, so he says, “Mr. Fender, did you go to school?” Says, “Yes, I went to school.” “Did you go to grammar school?” He says, “Yes, I went to grammar school.” “Did you go to high school?” “Yes, I went to high school.” Says, “Did you go to college?” “Yes, I went to junior college.”

So he says, “You went all through school, all through two years at college, and what did you major in at college?” Leo says, “Accounting!” I thought I was gonna fall under the table. Oh my god, can’t believe it.

We were traveling back and forth to LA with our attorneys, and on the way home I said Leo, “You’ve got to be the worst witness I have ever heard of or seen or thought of in my life!” “Wha’s the matter Don, wha’d I do?”

I said, “For one thing, when the guy had you on the stand, he asked you what is your name. And you looked at him, thought for a minute, and said, ‘Would you repeat that question?'” Leo says, “Oh, I didn’t do that did I?” ‘Course, the attorney was about to crack up. As a matter of fact, Leo did work for the state highway department for a while in the accounting department.

You say Leo was introverted. Why was that?

Just his nature, I don’t know why. His wife, Esther, was very outgoing, she was a super gal, full of life and fun. Leo would never want to go any place. Later he got to traveling some. But he didn’t have any friends, any relatives. Oh, he had a relative, Ronnie Beers, who was kind of his right-hand man at the shop, worked for him—a gopher was what he was.

Ronnie worked for a long time for him at Fender there, and then when Leo had this little company [CLF Research] after he left CBS. He did some messing around and Ronnie worked with him there. He finally put Ronnie out to pasture and he had no friendship or nothing, nothing to show for all the time.

Leo was a strange man. He didn’t form any alliances. He smoked at one time, and he quit smoking. He didn’t drink. He wouldn’t go back to shows. I’d have people out here on these purchase investigations and it was like pulling teeth to get him to meet them.

He just didn’t want anything to do with it. He was gracious enough once we got them together, you know, but it was only about a five-minute meeting and that was it.

I suppose strangers would think he was shy.

Yeah, he was just one of those guys, hardly did anything. His whole life was wrapped up with tinkering, fiddling around the shop.

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Finished writing the first draft of the Livewire Audio Frequency Generator user manual.

View it here and point out all of the mistakes I made in the comment section : )