I specifically remember…after Paul had asked me to be the lead guitar guy…listening to a bunch of Kinks stuff and trying to specifically emulate that. When Paul next came over and I played for him what I had in mind and told him the specific well I was drawing from (Paul had never told me to listen to Kinks solos), he said I was right on track.

I was kinda flattered ‘cuz I don’t consider myself nearly as astute a musical historian as Paul or Nate, so to hear from Paul that I’d done the right listening homework and was regurgitating it properly was awesome!

For the remix I had to try and “force” them into being what I needed them to be as best as I could, just using gates, compression, EQ filters, samples, whatever the fuck I could. Although I agree it still sounds a bit funny, I have to say I’m amazed at what I was able to resuscitate…that the overheads have some shimmer and some stereo field to them, that the kick and snare have any kind of “toughness” to them.

We recorded to tape, and although I have an 1/2″ eight track deck, we allowed ourselves only three tracks to record on before bouncing those tracks down to a fourth and then allowing ourselves to fill up three more, for a total of seven “sources” across four final tracks. I might not get this just right but I think…

Rhythm guitar, bass, and drums were recorded on two tracks, panned hard left or right, possibly keys added to the third track before the bounce. Post bounce, lead guitar was added on a fourth track, then vocals and vocal doubles added to the last two available tracks. I can’t remember if I allowed myself a “center channel” (i.e. one source coming out of both speakers at once) or kept everything hard left/right as was the necessity of early stereo consoles that did not have continuous panning.

Drums were handled with only a single tube condenser mic (again apropos the era being emulated) stuck kind of under the drum throne, and likewise I think all the other sources were done with the same kind of mic. Everyone in the same room, no isolation. Relative volumes and relative isolation was dealt with through the positioning of amps, drums, mics, etc in relation to each other for maximum rejection of bleed as much as is possible in such a situation. As would have been done back then, and as often still is! There IS such a thing as “good bleed”!

Everything was pushed through some kind of genuine tube preamp (beyond sounding great, all they really HAD back then) …I have a couple legitimate ones and then I rigged a tube guitar preamp to serve as a third. We pushed those really hard for breakup. The fact of the matter is that a lot of those old records have so much overdrive happening not because their tech was limited, but because they either didn’t know how to deal with levels on a loud rock band, or the studio was keeping a schedule where the rock band cut their single in between the Muzak folks coming in at 9 a.m. and the Palmolive jingle getting cut at 11:00…they just kept the board settings the same and rolled each set of musicians through in assembly line fashion. If one band was louder than the other two, and the mics started clipping the pres? Tough titty. Listen to some of the “big budget” stuff that was being cut around the same time, like the Sinatra stuff, Martin Denny, whatever, and you’ll hear a far superior sound coming through. Simply because those guys had all the clout, got the best rooms, and didn’t have to share.

One finds that in bouncing all this information down and then adding stuff on top of it, you often get your mixes a little wrong. Sometimes the first wave of stuff ends up being just too quiet in the end. So you try and anticipate that by mixing certain things overly loud before the bounce. After that you just have zero control over relative volumes or panning. But I still totally fucked it up IMHO. At the very least, the keyboards are a touch loud and the guitar solo is a bit hard to hear.

But I take solace in the fact that I’m not alone….you hear mixes from that era all the time where it sounds practically acapella with all instrumental tracks ranking a weak second to the vocals. Even some LATE 60s/early 70s stuff you can still hear this going on, like the first two CSN albums, where the guitars sound really dead and fluttery, the drums barely there. It makes me want to find out if they were limited to a very modest studio (4 or eight tracks) at that point in their careers, if it was a conscious style choice, or if they just redid tracks and punched in so many times that they wore the oxide right off the tape.

At the time I had just made a couple of pivotal recording gear purchases: my Otari 8-channel tape machine (which I still own) and a Rode tube microphone, which ended up being…like a lot of “big catalog” gear…more about a marketing effort than about what tube mics are supposed to sound like.

Anyhow I really wanted to try out this new stuff and work up my chops on the analog tape machine, so I suggested to Nate and Paul that we pick a cover tune of their choosing and just go for it. I think that invitation was the main impetus for taking the time to do it, and then from there Nate and Paul chose Paperback Writer as the track to do.