Session Notes: Recording Status Quo

The Practical Craft of Recording
By Andy Brook

Francis Rossi and Andrew Bown writing for Backbone, which you can hear at https://statusquo.lnk.to/Backbone.

Guest engineer Andy Brook discusses his approach to recording the legendary British rockers' 33rd studio album.

There can't be many acts who've released as many albums as Status Quo. I recently had the privilege of working on their 33rd studio album, Backbone. Shortly before embarking on the project, I'd taken over the reins in the Quo camp from Grammy award-winning engineer Gregg Jackman, and as I'd already worked on the Francis Rossi & Hannah Rickard release 'We Talk Too Much' I had some experience of working with Rossi. But Backbone was to be forged in very different circumstances to previous Quo albums.

This would be the first record of original material to be released since long-time guitarist Rick Parfitt passed away in late 2016, and the first album to feature the newest band members, Leon Cave and Richie Malone. It was also the first Quo album that Rossi decided he'd produce solely by himself since 1991's Rock 'til You Drop, and from the outset he was determined to make it very differently from the Quo albums of the '90s and '00s. He wanted to make it on his own terms, rather than deliver something the band felt expected or obliged to — so when I say it was a privilege to be involved in this project, it's not just about the excitement of working with a big name; it was also a genuinely original, interesting and engaging project.

In this article, I'll take you through how we approached the Backbone sessions, explaining some of the decisions we made and techniques that we used along the way, and hopefully I'll be able to cover a few things that might be of benefit to your own productions.

Building On The Demos

We recorded, mixed and mastered the entire project at Rossi's home studio. It's obviously a little grander than what most SOS readers would think of as a 'home studio' — it comprises a live room, a green room, a vocal booth and a comfortable control room, with a Harrison 48:32 console at its heart — but it offered us a similar balance of pros and cons. The band would, of course, be able to record the final album in the studio, but they'd also have the luxury of time to work on developing the songwriting and making demos there too.

Over the years the studio has made the move from recording on ADAT machines to a Mackie HDR 24-track hard-disk recorder and then, eventually (on Jackman's arrival), to a computer-based setup based on Logic Pro X. I'm actually a dyed-in-the-wool Pro Tools user, but it was important that I use the in-house system for this production — thankfully though, I've used Logic many times over the years, which meant the switch to Logic wasn't too daunting.

The Harrison console in Francis Rossi's home studio, with some of the other gear mentioned in this article in the rack to the right, including dbx 160 and Drawmer 1960 compressors.

The band started the demo sessions around February 2018 with a view to recording the album in the Autumn. We kept everything that Rossi and long-term collaborators Andrew Bown, John 'Rhino' Edwards and Bob Young sketched out during songwriting sessions, and we also imported drafts from band members who'd recorded things remotely, on various systems: Boss hardware recorders, Logic sessions, and even some voice memos.

This material formed the core of the album and was kept for reference in the working project right up until the final mix — in fact, a few of the 'demo' parts we'd recorded even made it onto the finished record. The idea of retaining the demo material throughout was that we could make sure we never lost sight of the energy in those original ideas — and I think it's fair to say this approach worked well.

One upshot of working with the demo material in these sessions in this way was that the drums were not the first thing we laid down, as they typically are in rock productions. Instead, we built the album recordings around the guides we'd created during the writing sessions, starting each song off by recording guide guitars from each writing partnership, and a guide vocal from Rossi.

Whether working on demos or the final product, I'm a firm believer in using studio time with the artist for recording; the engineer/producer should always be focused on capturing the energy of the performances, and things like editing, processing and comping can be done later at your own leisure. Rossi has a similar philosophy. Thankfully, it was also apparent from an early stage that Backbone was not going to be a project that would leave us with take upon take of material to sift through later— recording really was a case of getting down just one or two takes (three at most) that could be tidied up to appear as the final 'take' on the record.

Vocals

Although I've just called them 'guide' vocals (since that was the intention), we rarely needed to redo any of these initial lead vocal parts, other than to drop in a word or two to accommodate the occasional lyrical tweak. At some stage, the lead vocal would be double tracked, to achieve the definitive Status Quo vocal sound — sometimes immediately after the initial take, sometimes after everything else had been laid down. Incidentally, it's fascinating to see just how exacting an artist is about their double tracking when they've spent a lifetime doing it! I often reach for Synchro Arts' Vocalign or Revoice Pro when dealing with multiple vocal tracks, but great as those tools are, for this album I happily left them unused on the lead parts.

We used an AKG C414 and a Neumann U87 set up in tandem, each running through a dbx 160 VCA compressor. On many 'classic' Quo records the vocals were tracked and double-tracked with a C414, a setup that persisted until Jackman encouraged Rossi to adopt the U87 in the '90s. Eager to see if the mic choice could help recreate a vintage sound, we kept both channels running for most of the early vocal takes, allowing us to compare the results later. As it turned out, the C414 wasn't as impressive as we'd anticipated — it sounded somewhat brighter, but it didn't really lend itself to this vocal. The U87 wasn't entirely what we wanted straight off the bat either — it offered something the C414 didn't, yet still seemed sort of 'muted'. To arrive at the desired sound, we EQ'ed the U87 to emulate the frequency response of the C414, which yielded a nice, full-bodied tone, with neutral mids and airy highs.

A theme of huge 'block vocals' developed very early on into the recording process, and this became part of the signature sound for the album. It was a case of quadruple-tracking a background part and then adding a fifth and an octave above that (again, quad tracked). These had to be super tight — unnatural even — to achieve the desired effect, so I made liberal use of Revoice Pro for this. (Prime examples of this sound can be heard on the tracks 'See You're In Some Trouble', 'Backing Off' and 'Falling Off The World'.)

Electric Guitars

The move away from the wall-of-guitars sound of some recent Quo records was deliberate. The idea was to get the sound to 'breathe' more, and so our approach involved capturing sounds with considerably less harmonic distortion, and again choosing not to track take upon take of the same part.

Many of the songs were constructed around riffs, but there's a signature sound to Quo which involves a guitar figure movement from playing a fifth and then a sixth and then back again — otherwise known as 'the finger'. It forms the rhythmic basis of the songs, so we chose to get these down at an early stage — other figures and parts could then be developed around them.

Rossi is an exceptional blues guitar player and rather than recording rehearsed ideas for the solos on this album, he preferred to jam them out to see what felt right. As with the vocals, it was a case of two to three takes before discussing whether he'd nailed the part and if it served the song. As a guitar player myself, I had to make a concerted effort to think as an engineer/producer, more in terms of the record and how the phrasing, articulation and tone of the solos sat in the song than I usually would as a player. Sometimes we'd fine-tune the parts (not as easy as you'd expect when it's all improvised like this!) or comp the solo out of the two or three takes we had on file.

To capture Rossi's guitar sound, a Shure SM57 facing the centre of the cone of a Marshall JCM900 combo made the biggest contribution, but this was mixed with a more distant Neumann KM183 omni room mic set up at head height.
We quickly got into a system of a three-channel recording setup for Rossi's parts, with a DI signal feeding a tailored AC30 emulation in Logic, and a dual-miked 60W Marshall JCM900 combo set up in the live room. A Shure SM57 was placed dead centre on one of the cones, and a Neumann KM183 omni small-diaphragm capacitor model placed six feet from the amp at head height, to give us a more neutral reading of the room — the omni pattern doesn't seem to exaggerate room modes as much cardioid mics tend to. The height was simply set to reflect what the listener would hear if stood in the room.

For the most part Rossi used his custom Status guitar. This is a solid alder body model, fitted with Hot Rail pickups and a bolt–on graphite neck, and featuring a variety of tonal controls. I confess that I had my doubts to begin with — but I'd soon find myself pleasantly surprised by this instrument's versatility. Depending on the material, I often like to use some form of physical noise control, such a Gruv FretWrap (string damper) when recording guitars, and something like this is essential when dealing with carbon-fibre models, which always seem to exaggerate sympathetic resonances.

Richie Malone's demos had been recorded at home on his Boss BR‑800, using some of that device's COSM modelling options. In comparison with the less saturated tracks Rossi had already laid down, the tone was heavily driven, and the juxtaposition worked really well. Again, in keeping with the demo-to-delivery approach, we embraced the Boss unit as part of Malone's sound when he flew over to record his parts. We ended up running that in tandem with a Marshall JCM2000 TSL that I'd brought in, and another AC30 model in Logic.

The only part of the album that was recorded with more than one musician at the same time was when Andrew Bown came in to lay guitar parts for the tracks 'Running Out Of Time' and 'Backing Off'. He'd co-written these songs with Rossi, and we managed to capture a real vibe when both of them played together. This is not to say that recording this way will necessarily be better, but it's always worth experimenting. In this case it made a refreshing change to do things a little differently and, unarguably, you can hear the chemistry in the result.

The more parallel the mic is to the snare head, the more attack it will deliver; and the more perpendicular, the more 'body' it will capture.

Drums

I'd previously done some recording with drummer Leon Cave on other projects — we'd even played in the same band at one point — and I knew him to be a no-fuss player who'd nail each song in a couple of takes. So it was imperative that we capture everything successfully in the short time he'd be in the studio, and not rely on pick-ups at a later date.

There was a conscious decision to spot-mic the cymbals and glue the drum kit sound together with a room mic rather than traditional overheads. And despite some pricer and vintage options, an inexpensive AKG D112 was preferred for the main kick mic.

Leon's kick is fitted with a suspended Shure Beta 52 to allow for quick setups, and it sounds great but it's generally a good plan to aim for the right sound before reaching for EQ, so I wanted to audition some other options. I'm a big fan of the Audix D6, but we wanted something less 'snappy' here; warmer, but still with some 3-5 kHz presence. An AKG D12 was certainly warmer but lacked top-end. We ended up preferring an AKG D112, placed just inside the port of the kick drum. I ran this through a Drawmer 1960 tube preamp/compressor, with a slow attack, release timed according to each song, and a ratio of around 3:1 — it wasn't what you'd call subtle, but it gives a nice sustained fat kick sound. I also added a Solomon LoFReQ mic (a variant on the sub-kick theme) just outside the shell to augment this with some smooth low end, and after a couple of placement alterations to improve the phase relationship with the D112 we had our hard-hitting kick sound.

The snare, a Noonan Deluxe 10-lug 14 x 5.5-inch brass drum, was miked with an SM57s on each head (one polarity inverted, of course), paying particular attention to the angle of the one covering the batter head. The more parallel the mic is to the snare head, the more attack it will deliver; and the more perpendicular, the more 'body' it will capture. We wanted snap, so we went with a low profile, and left enough distance to avoid the worst excesses of proximity-effect bass boost.

The SM57 snare mic's body was low, and almost parallel with the snare's head, helping to capture plenty of each hit's attack.
I approached the toms similarly, using Beyer M201s on the racks and Sennheiser MD 421s on the two floor toms. (The M201s' tight hypercardioid pattern makes them great for isolation, but MD 421s deliver a beefier sound, despite their flatter low-end response.) These were all run through dbx 160 compressors, and some subtle EQ was applied via the Harrison console — this is a parametric EQ, making it easy to isolate and boost the fundamentals for each tom while scooping the mids and adding a touch more attack.

Rather than opt for an X‑Y or A‑B overhead configuration, I spot-miked the crashes, china and ride cymbals individually, with a few Neumann KM184s. This gives ultimate control over their balance in the mix and can deliver a brilliant tonal quality that exaggerates certain nuances often lost with more distant recording techniques. You must make sure these spot mics are not too close to the cymbal, or shear waves can cause the diaphragm of the mic to distort. A good rule of thumb is to have the mic at least the diameter of the cymbal away from the surface, and to offset any transverse wave distortion by angling the mic between 45 to 67.5 degrees. Perhaps counterintuitively, this spot-mic approach can help avoid phase issues — although there are more mics, there's no one overhead pair that all the others need to be phase-aligned to.

For the hi-hat, a U87 was set to fig-8 mode, and the side nulls were aimed at other cymbals for maximum rejection.
For the hats, I used a U87 set to figure-8, pointing horizontally towards the floor tom across the hi-hat, and with the side null aiming at the surrounding cymbals. This was extremely effective in rejecting other elements and created a tight isolated hat signal.

Without a typical overhead setup, the room mic could play an important role. I used another U87, this time set to omni and placed at the farthest point in the room from the kit. Being so close to a physical boundary gives it some semblance of a PZM, but with the addition of the low–end boost you'd expect from a U87. Again, with such a distant, ambient mic, phase relationships weren't such a critical issue.

Bass

John Edwards played through a Markbass LMK head, each channel of which offers an arsenal of parameters (you can blend between these channels too).

The Markbass cabinet was miked up with an AKG D112 and a Subkick-style Solomon mic, but two DI signals were also captured for maximum flexibility — one direct from the instrument, and one post the Markbass head's preamp stage.
The head powered a Markbass 4x10 cab, which I miked with a D112 and a Solomon LoFReQ. I took two DIs (one from the instrument, and one via the head) for possible re-amping. While there were no phase issues between the mics, there was work to do to align those signals with the DIs. (It's not uncommon to find phase-alignment issues between electrical and acoustic signals captured from the same source, so it's always worth checking — the solution usually lies in time-alignment or using an all-pass filter, sometimes called a 'phase rotator'.)

Acoustic Guitar

Acoustic guitar only appears on the introduction to 'I See You're In Some Trouble'. We recorded 16 separate takes of this intro, with a U87 set to omni, a KM183 room mic and a DI fed from the guitar's piezo pickup. As the texture swelled, it became apparent that the DI tracks were inconsequential and the room mics needed to be used minimally.

Once I'd tidied the tracks up, panned and levelled them to taste, they were bounced as a stem and all the original tracks discarded from the Logic session. I'm all for keeping alternate takes and versions 'just in case', but when you have already have the sound you're after it makes no sense to clog up the GUI, and sometimes it's good just to commit to a decision.

Keys

Rossi had recently picked up a Yamaha Clavinova CSP-150 on tour, on account of its impressive on-board sound library, and this sat in the corner of the studio with a pair of Roland DS-90A monitors, creating a nice 'keys' station that gave Andrew Bown a degree of privacy to work in — Rossi felt this did something for Bown's comfort, compared with sitting him in the middle of the room. He was right: Bown really shone when working in his corner!

Having initially played an organ part through a triple-miked Leslie cabinet, for this record the band eventually settled on Logic Pro's Vintage B3 virtual instrument.
Most of the keys parts were recorded as audio, with only a few using MIDI to access some sounds from Logic's EXS24 sampler or EastWest's Composer Cloud after the event; with a player of Bown's calibre, there's no need to keep the MIDI purely to tweak the performance. There's a great deal of tonewheel organ on the record, and to begin with we fed a Roland RD‑2000 stage piano patch through a Leslie cabinet, with a three-mic setup. But while Bown has always been something of a purist when it comes to recording Hammond, he was open to broadening his approach, so we tried triggering Logic's Vintage B3 virtual instrument using the RD‑2000. With a couple of MIDI-learned control changes and a drum-speed switch operated by a volume pedal, we were away! The sonic difference was small but, importantly, there were now no squeaks, mechanical noises or voltage drops to worry about.

We also made good use of Roland's pocket-sized VP‑03 vocoder in the second verse of 'Liberty Lane', although it proved tricky to capture the sound we wanted as we found the VP‑03's input seemed prone to overloading with loud vocals. After experimentation with different mics, we found this device worked best when singing in the register of the keyboard part... and even then it needs be more of a whisper than a firm vocal to really get the effect to shine.

Mixing

This article was intended to be more about recording than mixing, so I'll only pick out a few mixing highlights — but I'll emphasise that this wasn't a linear project, where we'd finish tracking everything and then start mixing. In fact, there wasn't any separation between these stages, and that was deliberate. If there was an idea for the mix it would be executed there and then. We wouldn't have to revisit ideas later, and that helped to keep everything fresh.

An interesting aspect of these mixes was that I'd set up a side-chaining template at a very early stage, aiming to address a lot of mix issues almost automatically. The bass was ducked by the kick and the floor toms to let those events punch through; the hats by the snare, to keep the snare attack nice and clear; the rhythm guitars by the lead guitar figures; and the entire track by the main vocal. These interactions were subtle, with only 1-2 dB of gain reduction at most, but it really helped to glue things together without having to engage automation at every turn. That said, we eventually abandoned the idea of using the vocal to duck the mix; when it comes to where a vocal sits, there's a clear distinction between pop and rock tracks, and the side-chaining gave the vocal too much prominence.

The bottom end of the snare was 'shaved' to remove some honk/boxiness. People often opt to push a snare in the 150-250 Hz area to fatten it, but I find this can be counterproductive in the context of the mix. Wanting to push the snare further sonically, we instead opted to use gated reverb to fashion the drum's decay. (Decay times were always song-specific, designed so they'd fall in line with the tempo of the track.)

We also took a lot of low end out of the vocals, particularly the BVs, to address what Rossi would describe as 'woofiness' or 'wooliness' — that distinctive build up of 'mud' when multiple layers of vocals are stacked, even when more conservative high-pass filters (around 100-120 Hz) are used. We pushed the filter for most vocals to around 300Hz, and even 500Hz in a couple of case. It's amazing just how much of a sound we can still perceive when its fundamental frequency is missing!

Mastering

The album that the band, the record label, the management and the agent had heard in the studio prior to mastering was dynamic, earthy and organic. We needed to maintain this in the finished record, so the final master needed to be supremely sympathetic to the mix.

After having a few test masters back, a decision was made that the album would be mastered 'in-house' — in other words, by me! The main argument in favour of this approach was that everyone who'd heard it to date was very excited with how it sounded, so it didn't make sense to outsource the project and have that sonic content change. Now, I do enjoy the mastering process but I'm also of the mind that if you've been involved in the recording and mixing, it's essential to get some distance from the project before returning to work on it at this stage. So I made a point of stepping back for a while, and spent some time listening to current releases to get a better idea of contemporary trends.

Thankfully, we seem to be reaching a time where we aren't necessarily expected to produce unnecessarily loud or over-compressed masters. Having approached the mixing understanding that someone else would master the record, I'd paid very close attention to the levels throughout, making sure there was ample headroom on the master bus, and avoiding clipping at plug-in, track, group or aux stages. That was harder than it sounds, due to the sense of excitement in the room; throwing track after track at a song eats headroom quickly, and it kills creativity if you keep stopping to rebalance the mix. You can't just bring all the faders (or fader groups) down when automation is already in force, though — in those cases, creating VCA groups allowed me to claw back headroom quickly, without disturbing the mix balance.

I mastered 'in the box' using iZotope Ozone 5 (not a current version — I prefer the interface and I use some tools that aren't available in later revisions!). There's no point applying processes for the sake of it — mastering is all about listening and making judgments. But for this project, I typically used M‑S multiband compression to tame the bottom end and expand the high-mids and highs without making things too wide. I also applied subtle low-end boost for an added sense of weight, and an air boost to brighten the high-end a touch. A tiny amount of filtered reverb (high-passed at 500Hz and low-passed at 2kHz) helped gel things together — the filtering prevented this tactic making the end result sound too boomy or bright.

The other issue one has to contemplate when mastering, of course, is loudness. I really like the interface of Waves' WLM loudness meter, and used that here — I don't aim at a particular LUFS figure, but it's handy to keep an eye the meter while making decisions. Rossi and I agreed that we didn't want to push the levels too hard, and we found that if we tended to stay on the safer side of -10 LUFS it generally worked well: it didn't compromise the dynamics or sonics of the music, and the result was a polished, punchy, dynamic master that satisfied everyone involved and that any discerning listener could enjoy.

Here's what Francis Rossi had to say on the mastering: "We realised the way we mastered was different compared to many modern [records]... I don't see where the musicality is in making it louder. Surely, musicality comes with maintaining the dynamics. There might've been listeners that found the album is not as loud as some current releases. However, we do have amplifiers and a volume control — turn the fucking thing up!

"At one point we'd got so far with the mastering, and I remember thinking it just sounds like every other Quo thing we've done. We went back a notch or two from there, and it sounded like it does now. You have to let the music breathe a bit. It breathes when it's live. It breathes when it's being put down... We ended up with a record that does just that."

About The Author

Andy Brook.
Our special guest author for this month's Session Notes feature is Andy Brook (pictured), who works freelance as a producer, mix engineer, recording engineer and musician, and has produced, engineered and toured with the likes of Status Quo, Bonnie Tyler, Ginger Wildheart, Uriah Heep, Francis Rossi, Mel Gaynor, Greg Jackman, Del Amitri, Travis, Tiger Lillies, Wonk Unit, and Rich Ragany & the Digressions.

www.andybrook.com

Published January 2020

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