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Title5Take1

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His Majesty

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Title5Take1
Mick in ACCORDING TO THE ROLLING STONES (p.116): "I remember the recording session for `Jumpin' Jack Flash', and not liking the way it was done very much. It was a bit haphazard—and although the end result was pretty good, it was not quite what I wanted. The fidelity wasn't that great; it wasn't quite as in your face as it could have been."

I love it, but I do wonder what it would have been like with straight electric guitars, rather than overloaded acoustic guitars.

The majority of the guitars are electric.

There's contradictory info regarding whether Olympic Studios was 4 or 8 track by this time. If it were still 4 track, then perhaps the whole recording process, plus bouncing down degraded things a bit too far for Micks liking.

I was just going by what Keith said on the same page: sophistication, but I just want to reduce it back to basics.

I know what he says about it, but his explanation on how they recorded the acoustic guitar in itself reveals that at best there were only 1 or 2 acoustics on that tape machine recording.

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Doxa
Thankks howled for the "Nowhere to Run" info! Like with sssoul I have 'always' being awere of the "Dancing in The Street" reference, and no matter how much I have listened the song, I have never heard the riff there! Clearly, someone has once somwhere confused two Martha and The Vandellas songs!

There is the Zeppelin plagiarism thread where the great rock riffs are discussed, starting from "Smoke on the Water".. it starts to sound like all of them were invented by some black horn player cutting r&b/soul number...

(Has Keith the riffmaster invented any classical Stones riff? Brian did "The last Time", Keith then dreamed "Nowhere to Run", which then Bill reformed to "Jumpin' Jack Flash". Ry Cooder did "Honky Tonk Women", and Jagger "Brown Sugar"... Okay; my question is rheorical, and should not be taken seriously; the term "inventing" in rock and roll is vague one... Keith's antenna disn't care much about the sources of the ideas but his genious was transforming them to masterpieces)

- Doxa

IMO the "real" Keith "the riff master" Richards was born in the South of France. Exile, If you cant rock me, Dance Little Sister, Hot Stuff. Thats Keith.

I think Keith can put it all together, rally the troops like he says.

If a riff or idea comes from someone or something else then Keith can do things with it and finish it off.

Sometimes Keith comes up with the riffs and ideas of course but quite a few riffs and ideas don't seem to have originated from Keith.

Like, the Jumpin Jack Flash riff, The Last Time riff, Satisfaction riff, Brown Sugar, It's Only Rock and Roll, Recorder leading to Ruby Tuesday etc

The Stones seem to bounce ideas around while they are in the studios.
Like Sympathy goes from Bob Dylan to a Samba for instance.

Bill Wyman

We got to the studio early once and... in fact I think it was a rehearsal studio, I don't think it was a recording studio. And there was just myself, Brian and Charlie - the Stones NEVER arrive at the same time, you know - and Mick and Keith hadn't come. And I was just messing about and I just sat down at the piano and started doing this riff, da-daw, da-da-daw, da-da-daw... and then Brian played a bit of guitar and Charlie was doing a rhythm. We were just messing with it for 20 minutes, just filling in time, and Mick and Keith came in and we stopped and they said, Hey, that sounded really good, carry on, what is it?
- Oh, that was just something we were messing with.
- That sounds good.
And then the next day all I can really remember... we recorded it and Mick wrote great lyrics to it and it turned out to be a really good single.

Ron Wood said of this song: "That was recorded in my house in 1974. In Richmond. The original tape was made there in my studio with Willy Weeks on bass, Kenny Jones on drums, me on guitar, and David Bowie and Mick on vocals. And Keith said, 'I've taken the precaution of wiping all of your guitars.' And I said, 'Oh, mate. This is the guy I'm gonna have to spend some time with. I suppose I better get used to it.' I said, "But you forgot one thing, Keith. You forgot my 12 string." And he said, "No. I left that on." So that's still on there. It's still got a flavor of the original recording."

Marianne Faithfull

"Brian . . . played a folkish, nursery rhyme melody on the recorder. It was nothing more than a wispy tune, but it caught Keith's attention . . . he had heard a riff and went at it like a dog with a bone . . . it was really Brian and Keith's song …"

From "Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky" by David Henderson.

Jimi was honored to attend a Rolling Stones recording session for "Ruby Tuesday." It was really Brian Jones's session.

Brian would tell with great relish of how he and Keith Richards worked and worked on coloring, adding dramatic yet wispy touches here and there, alternating the mix between lead voice and background vocal harmonies, while interplaying exotic instruments.

[launch.dir.groups.yahoo.com]

"I've spent time in the studios with the Stones when they
recorded in Paris and of all the recording sessions I've
attended, theirs were the strangest ones.
Contrary to most artists who'd come in the studio with a
very definite idea of what they were going to record they'd
spend hours and hours just playing around, trying different
things with hardly any specific direction or intention. Then
when they'd find a idea which Mick liked they'd start fooling
around with it until it sort of started to take shape and this
would go on for hours and hours. So actually the songs were
created in the studios. Very interesting no doubt but it could
be extremely frustrating when nothing came out of it.
But the most surprising thing about their sessions was the fact
that they didn't even have a recording time set. For instance
they'd say (or rather Mick would say) we'll record tomorrow.
There's be no time set at all, so they'd all come at their own
time. You'd generally see Bill come in first at around 9 o'clock,
then he'd wait for the others who'd come in one after the other
until everybody was there. Mick, always the last one, sometimes
came hours and hours later. Nobody complained even though they'd
been waiting for something like 5 or 6 hours !
Really the strangest sessions I've ever seen."

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His Majesty

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Title5Take1

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His Majesty

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Title5Take1
Mick in ACCORDING TO THE ROLLING STONES (p.116): "I remember the recording session for `Jumpin' Jack Flash', and not liking the way it was done very much. It was a bit haphazard—and although the end result was pretty good, it was not quite what I wanted. The fidelity wasn't that great; it wasn't quite as in your face as it could have been."

I love it, but I do wonder what it would have been like with straight electric guitars, rather than overloaded acoustic guitars.

The majority of the guitars are electric.

There's contradictory info regarding whether Olympic Studios was 4 or 8 track by this time. If it were still 4 track, then perhaps the whole recording process, plus bouncing down degraded things a bit too far for Micks liking.

I was just going by what Keith said on the same page: sophistication, but I just want to reduce it back to basics.

I know what he says about it, but his explanation on how they recorded the acoustic guitar in itself reveals that at best there were only 1 or 2 acoustics on that tape machine recording.

KEITH: "With Jumpin' Jack Flash and Street Fighting Man I'd discovered a new sound I could get out of an acoustic guitar. That grinding, dirty sound came out of these crummy little motels where the only thing you had to record with was this new invention called the cassette recorder... Playing an acoustic, you'd overload the Philips cassette player to the point of distortion so that when it played back it was effectively an electric guitar...There are no electric instruments on Street Fighting Man at all... All acoustic guitars. Jumpin' Jack Flash the same. I wish I could still do that, but they don't build machines like that anymore."
- Keith Richards, Life (2010)

KEITH: "I used a Gibson Hummingbird (acoustic) tuned to open D, six string. Open D or open E, which is the same thing - same intervals - but it would be slackened down some for D. Then there was a capo on it, to get that really tight sound. And there was another guitar over the top of that, but tuned to Nashville tuning. I learned that from somebody in George Jones' band in San Antonio in (1964)... (The high-strung guitar) was an acoustic, too. Both acoustics were put through a Phillips cassette recorder. Just jam the mic right in the guitar and play it back through an extension speaker."
- Keith Richards, 2002

From: [www.timeisonourside.com]

P.S. The TimeIsOnOurSide.com website has the following credits (in toto) for Jumpin' Jack Flash:

JUMPIN' JACK FLASH:
Drums: Charlie Watts & Keith Richards
Bass: Keith Richards
Acoustic guitars: Keith Richards
Lead vocal: Mick Jagger
Background vocals: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards & Jimmy Miller
Maracas: Mick Jagger
Piano: Ian Stewart
Organ: Bill Wyman



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2011-12-08 07:55 by Title5Take1.

-What else can one say? PLay it in Open E; makes a hell of a difference.-

* yeah it doesn't sound as good. open G is the best sounding way to play it

JJF is undeniably one of, if not if, the greatest stones song ever

but they have lots of great songs, man

you can play it in standard, open E, or open G (that I know of)

open G sounds best

to my ears

i think that stupid whoopie goldberg movie said it was in B flat

its not

the studio version has that fabulous, classic opening B-E-A

for some reason they cut that out, live

probably to do with the tunings I guess

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pinkfloydthebarber
i think that stupid whoopie goldberg movie said it was in B flat

Technically it's between keys and it's understandble why people think it's b flat.

You can't play along to it very well if your guitar is tuned to standard pitch. It used to drive me mad.

Maybe it was the transition from cassette to the studio format.

Maybe Keith wasn't tuned to pitch (there would be no surprise there).

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Title5Take1


KEITH: Playing an acoustic, you'd overload the Philips cassette player to the point of distortion so that when it played back
- Keith Richards, Life (2010)

KEITH: play it back through an extension speaker."
- Keith Richards, 2002

Yes, thanks for backing up what I am saying again.

Playing it back means that whatever is on the tape machine is played back through extension speaker. It wasn't a multi-track device, so you record something on to it, in case of SFM, Keith, Brian and Charlie strategically placed so as to get right 'live' mix for the first tape machine. This is then played back through speaker and recorded via a mic on that speaker on to one channel of Olympic Studios multi-track tape.

They then overdubbed normally on to that multi-track tape. In the case of SFM, it was another acoustic(not using tape machine), Tamboura, drums, bass, piano, vocals etc. With JJF drums, bass, 5 or so electric guitars, piano, organ, vocals etc etc.

Due to how they recorded the intitial Philips tape machine take there can only be a few instruments on it, a live take featuring 1 or 2 guitars possibly with percussion etc recorded on to the tape machine, then played back through extension speaker.

There's 7 or so guitars on JJF, only 1 or 2 are the acoustic through Philips tape machine, the rest are all electric guitars.

With SFM on the tape machine it's just one acoustic, Brian's near inaudible sitar and Charlie's portable trap kit. Even though they talk as if it's on the tape machine, the big sounding drums are an overdub, they are seperate from the distorted acoustic as is the tamboura etc etc.

Again, most of the guitars on JJF are electric.

[…] TW: Some people were amazed to read in your first Guitar Player cover story that on "Street Fighting Man" there are no electric guitars.
· Two acoustics, one of them put through the first Philips cassette player they made. It was overloaded, recorded on that, and then hooked up through a little extension speaker, and then onto the studio tape through a microphone.

· TW: You've paid quite a bit of attention to acoustic guitars in rock music.
· Well, I started on acoustic guitar, and you have to recognize what it's got to offer. But also you can't say it's an acoustic guitar sound, actually, because with the cassette player and then a microphone and then the tape, really it's just a different process of electrifying it. You see, I couldn't have done that song or that record in that way with a straight electric, or the sustain would have been too much. It would have flooded too much. The reason I did that one like that was because I already had the sound right there on the guitar before we recorded. I just loved it, and when I wrote the thing I thought, "I'm not going to get a better sound than this." And "Jumpin' Jack Flash" is the same, too. That's acoustic guitar.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2011-12-08 12:51 by howled.

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howled
[…] TW: Some people were amazed to read in your first Guitar Player cover story that on "Street Fighting Man" there are no electric guitars.
· Two acoustics, one of them put through the first Philips cassette player they made. It was overloaded, recorded on that, and then hooked up through a little extension speaker, and then onto the studio tape through a microphone.

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howled


· TW: You've paid quite a bit of attention to acoustic guitars in rock music.
· Well, I started on acoustic guitar, and you have to recognize what it's got to offer. But also you can't say it's an acoustic guitar sound, actually, because with the cassette player and then a microphone and then the tape, really it's just a different process of electrifying it. You see, I couldn't have done that song or that record in that way with a straight electric, or the sustain would have been too much. It would have flooded too much. The reason I did that one like that was because I already had the sound right there on the guitar before we recorded. I just loved it, and when I wrote the thing I thought, "I'm not going to get a better sound than this." And "Jumpin' Jack Flash" is the same, too. That's acoustic guitar.

He's talking about SFM for most of that.

The very process he talks about dictates that this way of recording the acoustic guitar can only be used for the first initial tape machine recording. Due to it not being a multi-track device, there can only be 1 or 2 guitars etc.

So no, JJF is not all acoustic guitars, 1 or 2 were used for the basic tape machine recording, but the 6 or so other guitars are electric.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2011-12-08 16:32 by His Majesty.

There are electrics on JJF to my ears.

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howled
There are electrics on JJF to my ears.

Of course there are, most of the guitars are electric. The tape machine acoustic is the muffled, dirty, compressed kinda driving guitar that plays a near constant driving rhythm.

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tomk


Olympic went 8 track somewhere between mid-to late 1969 and January 1970.
JJF was certainly a 4-track recording (bounced between 2 4-tracks probably).
I've heard that Advision was the first to have an 8 track in the UK.
Here's a nice web page about old UK studios.

[www.philsbook.com]

Great link! Thanks!

Listen to the NPR interview with Keith linked at bottom here. Interviewer Terry Gross asks Keith about his overloaded acoustic guitar method. The discussion starts around 14:35. The Keith quote just below is around 17:50:

KEITH: "Which is why you've got Street Fighting Man and Jumpin' Jack Flash. There are no electric guitars at all. It's just overloaded acoustic."

Terry Gross then asks Keith which of the two songs would he like her to play to display the results of this method, and Keith says (Solomonically), "Don't ask me to cut the babies in half."

So Terry Gross plays Jumpin' Jack Flash as the overloaded acoustic example.

Aside from the overloaded acoustic discussion, the the rest of the interview is worth listening to.

Audio interview at this link >>> [www.npr.org]

(NPR replayed the interview, and both versions are up—with added intro comments on the replay—so the spot where the above quotes are located differ on the different "versions" of the interview.)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2011-12-09 17:42 by Title5Take1.

He's just overstating the acoustic thing, mixing his memories of the SFM and JJF. The process he himself describes means that only 1 or 2 acoustics could have been recorded that way.

They record a basic track on to the tape machine, play it back through extension speaker and record that on to professional multi - track machine. Normal overdubbing then takes place without the use of the philips tape machine.

Also, the tape machine acoustic sounds totally different to the electric guitars. What sounds like electric guitars(ie most of em) is electric guitars.



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 2011-12-08 18:33 by His Majesty.

Yes there are electric guitars on JJF.

I wonder how many people thought the song was about heroin? I did, even remember arguing the point once many years ago. I also wonder if Keith's gardener Jack ever knew what an impact he had on the world's rock hungry youth? peace.

When songwriters write songs, the number one thing that they are trying to do is fit the words into the rhythmic scheme of the song.

Different words have inherent different accents and rhythmic schemes.

Keith talks about this in his book and says hardly any of the Stones songs are about drugs and he also talks about words and their vowels and how they have to fit in to the overall feel of the song.

"We also composed using what we called vowel movement--very important for songwriters. The sounds that work. Many times you don't know what the word is, but you know the word has got to contain this vowel, this sound. You can write something that'll look really good on paper, but it doesn't contain the right sound. You start to build the consonants around the vowels. There's a place to go ooh and there's a place to go daah. And if you get it wrong, it sounds like crap. It's not necessarily that it rhymes with anything at the moment, and you've got to look for that rhyming word too, but you know there's a particular vowel involved. Doo-wop is not called that for nothing; that was all vowel movement."


Jumpin' Jack Flash has many rhyming words with vowel movements as Keith calls them.

They don't really mean anything too much but the verse words are on the gloomy side about how bad things are which fit into the blues like rhythmic and melody scheme of the verses.

The verse lyrics could be as much about how awful school was and then how great it was now that they are out of school, then about anything.

Then the Chorus is the exact opposite and everything is ok.

There is some British humour in this gloom/ok contrast as well.

The words Jumpin' Jack Flash have a great implied rhythmic structure and that's why they are in the song.

Just saying the words Jumpin' Jack Flash creates a rhythm.

The Jumpin' Jack Flash words are not a message from Keith to his fans about drugs.

Keith and Mick are songwriters and they know all the tricks of the trade.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2011-12-09 03:53 by howled.

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howled
"We also composed using what we called vowel movement--very important for songwriters. The sounds that work. Many times you don't know what the word is, but you know the word has got to contain this vowel, this sound. You can write something that'll look really good on paper, but it doesn't contain the right sound. You start to build the consonants around the vowels. There's a place to go ooh and there's a place to go daah. And if you get it wrong, it sounds like crap. It's not necessarily that it rhymes with anything at the moment, and you've got to look for that rhyming word too, but you know there's a particular vowel involved. Doo-wop is not called that for nothing; that was all vowel movement."

Paul Simon did time at The Brill Building and verifies this way of writing.
This is one reason lots of songs at first make no sense then with repeated
listens carry their own logic ... it's this forced way of writing pop tunes
which is a bit sad and small, making the craft clinical, yet it is cool in
a way to know that people have studied rhythm and word combinations to create
maximum hit potential.

Hats off to Bill..................



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2011-12-10 11:24 by EddieByword.

.The first guitar on the intro is one of those overloaded acoustic ones. The guitar that does the riff and the high notes is an electric. Is the electric doing the riff tuned like this:

E-B-E-G?-B-E
or
E-B-E-E-B-E

The third string



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2011-12-09 20:53 by Redhotcarpet.

No.

It's

E-B-E-G#-B-E

[en.wikipedia.org]

Noy only one of two or three best Stones songs it is one of the best songs in all of rock 'n' roll!

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TheDailyBuzzherd
. it's this forced way of writing pop tunes
which is a bit sad and small, making the craft clinical,.

Indeed. Although the very best songs seem to avoid this and are more magical in their delivery just because they don't subscribe to any tricks, just pure emotion and verbal expression reign. The ones that are written in minutes, by themselves, a gift, incoming....done....as Mick and Keith would probably agree. peace.

Depends on a lot of things.

Trying to avoid cliches etc.

Mick and Keith have written stuff that to me sounds like it's full of cliches.

JJF is full of vowel stuff just like Keith's vowel stuff above.

JJF just works for some reason and mostly avoids any cringe like cliches.

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howled
No.

It's

E-B-E-G#-B-E

[en.wikipedia.org]

I know how to tune it in open E, I made a typo sorry, but my Q is if Keith changed the third string or not.

E-B-E-G#-B-E
or
E-B-E-E-B-E


is what I meant to write

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Redhotcarpet

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howled
No.

It's

E-B-E-G#-B-E

[en.wikipedia.org]

I know how to tune it in open E, I made a typo sorry, but my Q is if Keith changed the third string or not.

It was most likely just usual way of doing open E.

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His Majesty

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Redhotcarpet

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howled
No.

It's

E-B-E-G#-B-E

[en.wikipedia.org]

I know how to tune it in open E, I made a typo sorry, but my Q is if Keith changed the third string or not.

It was most likely just usual way of doing open E.

I thought so but then it's easier to just tune that third string to E when you play the riff.

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Redhotcarpet

I thought so but then it's easier to just tune that third string to E when you play the riff.

Easy to not play it when overdubbing lots of guitars too. The normal open E tuned 3rd string is needed for other parts.