In this digital age where performance is often sacrificed for technical perfection, both the Stones and Joe Jackson have recorded their latest albums live. In a special Track Record investigation we ask why.

Derived as it is from a combination of fanatical devotion to mono R&B recordings and the desire to keep a live garage-band feel, the Rolling Stones sound is unorthodox, to say the least, in a time when most of music's heavy-hitters routinely fill 48-track tape one track at a time. As deliberately ragged and rough as that sound can be, however, getting it down on tape is no artless exercise; there's far more to it than meets the ear. Engineer Dave Jerden, who rode the board for the year-long process of recording and mixing the forthcoming Dirty Work LP, takes us behind the scenes...

IM&RW: What was different for you as an engineer about working the Stones sessions?

Dave Jerden: The fact that they like to set up in what is basically a live situation. See, they really want a good sound, but what's foremost in their minds is spontaneity and having a good time. The way they record is not usually like, Okay-now-we-are-going-to-do-a-take (laughs); the rule of thumb is that they just play, and when everybody's feeling good they'll knock out a song, or maybe even several songs.

IM&RW: So the tape must be almost always rolling.

DJ: Pretty much, yeah. For the first six months, while we were at Pathe-Marconi in Paris, I had to record the two-inch at 15 ips Dolby because the tape machine was a Mark I Studer that was very noisy at non-Dolby 30 ips. We actually started rolling the two-inch just before we took our first break in March and continued all the way till the end of June; out of that we had 268 reels of two-inch tape, which we winnowed down to around 30 reels to bring with us from Paris to New York for over-dubbing and mixing. And we always had ¼-inch rolling, at 7½ ips; we came out with something like 500 reels of that (laughs). The trick was just keeping track of everything. We had books – we called them our bibles – one for the two-track and one for the 24-track stuff, which had everything listed. And virtually everything you hear on the record is the original stuff from those basics. There was a little sampling in the mixing, but there was never anything replaced, except little pieces on a couple of the songs, like the bass part on Hold Back.

IM&RW: What was the actual physical set-up like?

DJ: Well, we had this huge room at Pathe-Marconi, and the set-up was basically like a stage, PA system and all; it was different from anything I was used to. For example, usually you'd set up the drums in the best area of the room but we didn't do it like that, if you were looking at the band from the board, Charlie (Watts) was in the middle. Woody (Ron Wood) was to the left of Charlie, then Keith (Richards) to the right of Charlie, and then Bill (Wyman) to the right of Keith. And Mick (Jagger) in the centre, singing. Then to the far left was Chuck Leavell playing keyboards.

IM&RW: How did you work out the baffling?

DJ: In the studio they had these two kinds of gobos (screens). Then had the regular gobos, which are on wheels, flat-panelled, eight inches thick, five-by-four, hard on one side and soft on the other. They also had these gigantic ones, four or five of them; each was about 15-20 feet high in three sections, in a kind of U-shape, with the side panels at about a 30-degree angle to the centre one. So I took three of those and put them around Charlie's drums with the hard side facing his kit. The first one, right behind his drums, had the U-shape facing the back of the studio, away from him; the other two were also facing away from him, off towards the sides. Now, if you can imagine turning the two side ones towards the front of the studio, where the band's playing what I've created off to the sides are little pockets. In those pockets, using four four-by-five-type gobos – three stacked on two of the sides, one on top, and one in the back – I built little boxes for the Boogie amps that Keith and Woody were playing through. So the front of those boxes was open, but I also kind of angled them away from Charlie's drums. The sound could only go one way – I'd stuffed the back with acoustic material – so it was coming at a 45-degree angle out from Charlie. That way you could hear everything great standing out in the room, and what you heard in the control room was a recorded sound.

IM&RW: What was the miking setup?

DJ: For Charlie's drums I put a PVM, one on each side, up on those panels, and also 84s real high to pick up some air. We'd go from 421s to 57s on top of his two toms, and on the bottom I used ElectoVoice 250s. The snare was a 57 on the top, and I had a 421 inside the kick drum. I'd also brought over an MX-1 made by Mark Electronics, which is a triggering device, basically, a system of contact mikes that you can tape on drumheads; it's actually designed to be used with Simmons. But I used three of those contact mikes – one on the kick drum and one on top of each tom – for a different reason. See, Charlie hits the snare real hard, but he doesn't hit the kick drum real hard, and so I was getting more snare than kick-drum signal into the kick drum mike. So right behind his beater inside the drum I stuck on one of these contact mikes, which was fed into the control room, through two direct boxes so I wouldn't lose any signal, into the MX-1 box. That box puts out a square wave – a nice clean trigger – and I ran that through the key function Keepex 2; I also ran that 421 mike inside through the Keepex 2. In other words, every time he hit that kick drum it opened up a gate, just for a little poot. I compressed the 421 signal and put it through a Urei graphic EQ, then fed that into the board and EQed and compressed it again. With the toms I left the bottom mikes open all the time, and there was a rumble from them 'cause I had a lot of gain on them and a lot of low-end; and of course they were out-of-phase with the top mikes. But the contact mikes on top functioned in basically the same way as on the kick drum. When he hit the tom, the contact mike going through the MX-1 would open up a gate for a split second and let the signal from the. bottom mikes going through the Keepex open up, so you get that bottom and then cut it off. That way there was no rumble, just a big fat sound.

IM&RW: What about the guitars?

DJ: I recorded both Woody and Keith direct and miked. Because they were jumping from song to song a lot, I had to keep some control over the signal, so on the DI signal I put an 1176 compressor across, and on the mikes I put LA2As across. (Stones' equipment honcho) Alan Rogan had some Roland SD-3000 delay units; Woody and Keith each had one in the studio, and I had others in the control room with me. Keith used one, mainly, but because you can overload them so easily I'd let him get the setting he liked in the studio, then turn his off, recreate his settings on mine and feed the sound that way back to his cans, so he'd hear the same sound he wanted. There was also an isolation booth where I set up some Hiwatts, some big 4x12 Boogies, and also the collection of old Fender amps Alan Rogan has, which I used sometimes in conjunction with the Boogies.

IM&RW: What about the acoustic guitars on, say, One Hit To The Body?

DJ: I took Woody and put him behind the big gobo directly behind Charlie; I taped an ECM-50 to the guitar's soundhole, so there wasn't much leakage.

IM&RW: And the bass?

DJ: That was extremely easy to record. Bill has a real consistent touch and his custom basses all sound great, so I took him mostly DI.

IM&RW: Vocals?

DJ: Well, we had a Shure 58 out in the room, and we took a split off that – one to me, one to the PA.

And with that, the latest Stones LP was committed to tape. However, it's not only old rockers that are reverting to live studio recording, as Joe Jackson's producer David Kershenbaum will testify...

Joe Jackson's Big World

"180 degrees from regular multitrack recording" is how producer David Kershenbaum describes the making of Joe Jackson's latest A&M album, Big World, and Kershenbaum knows of what he speaks. He's produced an impressive variety of artists, including Duran Duran, The Everly Brothers, Joan Baez, Peter Frampton, Cat Stevens and Supertramp, but has found a very special artist in Joe Jackson. In addition to producing five of his LPs, Look Sharp!, I'm The Man, Night and Day, Body and Soul, and Big World – Kershenbaum (whose tenure at the label began as a Staff Producer and ended as Vice President of A&R) also signed Jackson to A&M.

Big World is also Jackson's eighth LP and in many ways a first for the contemporary recording world. The three-sided album consists of 15 new songs recorded live directly on a two-track digital master by Jackson and band guitarist Vinnie Zummo, bassist Rick Ford and drummer Gary Burke at the 500-seat Roundabout Theatre in New York City.

Commenting about the unusual method of recording the show, Kershenbaum recalled a running joke that "we'd actually mastered the album, mixed it and then made it!" Funny perhaps, but for most purposes true.

Though actual recording took place only on those three dates at The Roundabout, the seeds for this project were planted as far back as late 1983, when Kershenbaum and Jackson unsuccessfully attempted to record Body and Soul in this manner. Basically, the instrumentation of Jackson's ensemble (at that time guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, woodwinds and horns) and the room chosen for recording (the cathedral-like Masonic Lodge in New York City) were too large to control and faithfully capture Jackson's music in a live direct to two-track setting. At the roundabout, a 32-track digital recording system was employed to avoid leakage and other audio disparities.

Roughly two years later, Kershenbaum and Jackson were once again pounding the Manhattan pavement in search of a taut ensemble, and a dynamic yet controllable room in which to cook up some aural soul food. Those items secured, they embarked on what Kershenbaum called a "peak experience... with intense pressure."

After a month and a half of solid musical rehearsal, the band – with Kershenbaum and engineer extraordinaire Michael Frondelli (and later Masterdisk's VP and Chief Engineer Bob Ludwig) in Le Mobile recording unit – embarked on a series of unannounced club dates in and around NYC for 'dry runs' of the live recording to be done at The Roundabout. For Kershenbaum, that first meant spending a few days with Frondelli and engineer David Hewitt outfitting Le Mobile with specific outboard gear.

Kershenbaum and crew then used the recordings of these initial club dates to practise mixing, and to set-up a complex calibration system. Kershenbaum explains: "All sounds, balances, and echo levels were worked out in great detail and charted. We developed a system that involved making a template for the console, calibrating it and using colour-coded strips and dots with numbers on them for different settings. This helped us to get from one song to the next and mix it perfectly while he was doing his best performance live."

Incidentally, all the clubs in which they played were smaller than The Roundabout, and yes, when they set up shop there in late January all of the levels and balances had to be adjusted. With two shows a night, to call their run at The Roundabout hectic was a severe understatement.

"After the first show, we'd take the tapes and literally run to an apartment to listen to them, make notes of what had to be changed, run back and do the next show. By Saturday (the last night of their run), we still had some tracks we hadn't captured, and since everyone in the production crew, house staff and the audience knew what we were doing, the late show was like 'Rocky' with everyone pulling for us. When we finally nailed 'em, there was this tremendous cheer!"

'Everybody' included A&M principals Herb Alpert, Jerry Moss and Gil Friesen, who few in from LA to witness/encourage the proceedings. Mr Alpert even attend one of the club dates in Hoboken, NJ.

Simply put, Big World is one of the most exhilaratingly simple, vibrant performances, ever captured on vinyl, though not a typical 'live album' by any means. It's one of the rarer occasions where hi-tech highlights the human energy and spirit of the songs and not vice versa. For all concerned, the experiment was clearly a success.