Week 7 - Tuesday 4/23/1991

Recording "You Don't Know Me" and "Grassheads". Gates and Wallace argue. Puig uncovers the secrets to Paul McCartney's bass tone.

Gates struggled to sing the lead vocal part for "You Don't Know Me" for hours on end. He was in a very bad mood throughout the session and Wallace finally reached his boiling point.

Gates, sick and tired of singing yet another song that he despised, confronted Wallace. "I hate this song," he growled. "If I had my way, it wouldn't be on the record." The two of them began yelling at each other, exchanging insults and expletives. It was the most intense argument we'd had to date, and for one frightening moment I was afraid that Wallace would leave the session for good. Fortunately, they calmed down enough to listen back to the tape once again.

Winegar suddenly declared that the studio situation was making the recording process a "drag." Puig began a rapid-fire cross examination of him to find the exact source of his dismay. Winegar revealed it was Gates' hatred of studio pressures that was bringing him down the most. "I don't mind working in a professional studio, it's working with Adam in a studio that's no fun," he explained.

Puig pinned him down for specifics. "So, it's not me, or Wallace, or the studio itself that's making you so miserable?"

Winegar agreed with Puig's assessment, adding, "This band should go into a big studio and do a new song as if it were a demo, rather than spend months recording a whole album."

Work continued on "You Don't Know Me". Wallace concentrated on improving the vocal recorded on 4/16/1991, using a Harmonizer to fix pitching problems and using the vocals recorded today for the bridge section. After Winegar added some harmony vocals, Wallace cautiously announced the song's completion.

By 5:00, Puig and Winegar were working on the drum sounds for the next song to be tackled: "Grassheads", a groovy piece that brings to mind late-1960's Beatles recordings. Calling upon his vast knowledge of 1960's engineering techniques, Puig employed every trick in the book to give the recording an authentic 'vintage' flair. It was exciting to watch him work.

Puig employed the famed Glynn Johns drum miking technique, the one used to capture Bonham's huge sound with maximum phase coherence. It consists of one large diaphragm mic above the snare aimed downwards, a matched mic positioned just above the floor tom, equidistant from the snare and aimed horizontally across the kit at the hi-hats, a kick mic and one beneath the snare to pick up some snap. The two main mics are panned left and right, and the kick is centered in the mix. Winegar was pleased with the sound.

I spent a good deal of time discussing bass tones with Puig. He called up some engineer buddies to find out what setup McCartney used while recording the "White Album". Here's what Puig learned:

• McCartney used a Rickenbacker 4001 S with flatwound strings and the pickup selector usually set to the neck position.
• His amp was a Vox UL - an extremely rare head with solid state preamp electronics and an all-tube power stage. This probably drove a cabinet loaded with a 15" and a 12" speaker.
• The characteristic distortion sound was caused by breakup in the transistor preamp section of the amp, rather than the tube power amp stage.
• For "Helter Skelter", Paul played a Gibson SG bass that comes complete with a built-in distortion circuit. This effect is best emulated by plugging a bass into a Vox Tone Bender, which is a solid state fuzztone stomp box.

Winegar, Puig and I went to Guitars Are Us on Sunset Blvd. (across from Guitar Center) to rent an old Rickenbacker bass, a Rickenbacker hollow body guitar, and a Klira hollow body violin bass. Sadly, we had to return the Rickenbacker bass, since it had severe intonation problems.

That evening, our business manager (Lisa Fremer) treated the band, Mio, and Steve Rosen to dinner and a show at the Magic Castle. Before the show started, we goofed around in the mysterious bar area where an unseen 'ghost' plays requests on the piano. We tripped it up by asking to hear "Lady Madonna" by the Beatles; the piano ghost did its best, but clearly didn't know the tune very well. The show, starring the Pendragons, was great.