There is not a single word to describe the illustrious and diverse career that the guitar icon Jeff Beck has enjoyed for the past half century. He is the quintessential guitarist’s guitarist and has received the Grammy Award for Best Rock Instrumental Performance five times. In 2009 he was inducted into the Rock N Roll Hall Of Fame, presented by his old friend and former Yardbirds band mate, Jimmy Page. His most recent release, Emotion & Commotion, has recruited the efforts of producer/engineer Steve Lipson. Steve has worked with numerous artists, including Frankie Goes to Hollywood, The Animals, Whitney Houston, Grace Jones, Jars of Clay, Paul McCartney, Pet Shop Boys and Simple Minds. He also produced the first three solo albums by former Eurhythmics front woman Annie Lennox.
Emotion & Commotion is a bit of a departure from the Jeff Beck we know from days past where odd time signatures are met with screaming whammy bar solos. Not surprisingly, Steve started out as an engineer for The Rolling Stones, soon becoming a protégé of Trevor Horn at ZTT. In the UK there is a certain importance to working with Trevor Horn, which Steve has obtained and used very much to his advantage. I had the pleasure in speaking with Mr. Horn’s protégé on how one might go about recording an international guitar hero as Jeff Beck.
BTQ: How did you record the songs?
Steve: Probably everything I’m going to say is the worst-case scenario for those who are interested in recording. I used Pro Tools, we did everything individually and used the smallest, cheapest amplifier there was available, a Fender Pro Junior for about $400.00.
BTQ: But you captured his tone very well.
Steve: Yes I think it comes from his fingers. In a way he is not that bothered about big amps in the studio. He doesn’t like big amps anyway, from what I can gather. He just plugged into the amp and said that will do! And off we went.
BTQ: What did you mic him with, any particular favorites?
Steve: A Royer 122v (Ribbon Microphone with Vacuum Tube Circuit and Military-grade Tube) with a reflection filter screen. I close miked the amp in the same room as us, (we didn’t have a separate recording room.) We recorded the Royer through the Chandler LTD 2 straight into Pro Tools.
BTQ: Did you record through a particular console?
Steve: No, I just have a bunch of outboard gear, Pro Tools and ICON D Control surface.
BTQ: Jeff Beck has always been an idle of mine, how was it working with such a guitar hero? Also being the producer did you have a large part in picking the songs?
Steve: It was brilliant working with him because he is an idle of mine as well. I worked with him years ago; we did music for a TV program that was a half an hour. Sitting 3 feet from him whenever he was playing was extraordinary. But after a while it’s like anything else, you get past that and you treat him like anyone else to get a good performance. Still when I left the room and listened to what he did, it was magnificent! It’s funny, I’m a guitar player and we I play something it sounds like rubbish, but when he plays the same thing it sounds unimaginable. I read a couple of reviews stating that he didn’t stretch himself on the record, that remark is so ignorant it’s hysterical. He stretched himself quit a lot on this record because the simplest things are the hardest things to play. He is the master of it! Like the opening piece, Corpus Christi Carol, the way he delivers those notes is amazing. They are simple notes and anyone could play those notes, but nobody could play the emotion of those notes the way he does.
As far as song choices are concerned, it started with me telling him what I think he should do for the record. I gave him two CD’s of songs, he listened to them, and he liked a handful. From that point we started to record. We started with a rhythm section, but it didn’t work out. So Jeff and I went into a room and for the most part worked on the album. Then we got his keyboard player in, Jason Rebello, who had some song ideas, so the three us put them together. Then we got Tal Wilkenfeld, the bass player in to do her parts. Then lastly we recorded the drummer and added a few bits here and there. There are only two tracks we recorded altogether at once with the rhythm section.
BTQ: Did you have vocalists in mind when recording the songs?
Steve: Jeff, his manager Harvey Goldsmith and myself thought there should be singing on the record. Imelda May had worked with Jeff in the past and was very up for doing it. Olivia Safe is an opera singer who hangs around at the studio, so she sang on some tracks. And Jeff knew Joss Stone and she was up to it and came down and sang on two songs.
BTQ: I see that Trever Horn is listed as Executive Producer. What was his role in recording the album?
Steve: Well Trever and I have worked together for more than 20 years. He gave us encouragement and helped with a couple of edits. The main thing was his encouragement really, because it was such a long process. Just making sure we’re on track. After a while you get a little too close to things, so he was good at telling us it sounds good, keep going.
BTQ: Did you go somewhere else to mix or use your own studio?
Steve: I used the same room. I have a big room and I only use Yamaha NS-10’s to mix on. I moved all my recordings into the box completely and utterly. The difference it would make to go out into a console and back is so esoteric. I think that is focusing on the wrong things. There are more important things to focus on than that slight difference. 99% of the people that I would say, “I mixed it through a Neve” wouldn’t know the difference anyway. The pros of mixing in the box are so huge by comparison.
BTQ: Tell us about the choice of recording Over The Rainbow?
Steve: Jeff has been playing that live for a while. We didn’t choose it first because we were worried about the whole balance of the album. It was little bit too sweet we originally thought. I was mixing the record and Jeff was chopping some vegetables and he chopped the end of his finger off on his left hand. It was stitched backed on, but it took a few weeks to heal. In the meantime we had to do 2 songs and Over The Rainbow was one of them. So he played it without using that finger. Unbelievable! It was his first finger, the anchor finger for a guitarist. He recorded the whole song without that finger.
BTQ: What guitar did he use?
Steve: He used only one Fender strat that he is use to, nothing unusual about it. It has a break in the neck that has been repaired, but he really isn’t bothered by it. It’s a sad lesson to us all, I didn’t realize at the time, but what it states is that gear doesn’t matter! It just doesn’t matter at all. I remember years ago I was working with Paul McCartney and I was engineering. He was producing a Ringo Star solo album. It was very interesting session. There was a moment he said to Ringo why don’t you go sing the vocals. Ringo said yeah and I want to sing into that microphone, which was an old Shure Retro Styled Cardioid Dynamic, a rubbish mic. Paul said certainly. While the assistant was setting up the mic with Ringo, I asked Paul do you want to set up another proper microphone? He said no. After the session I was speaking to Paul and he said to me that the microphone does not matter, because it is all about the performance. If Ringo is happy singing into that mic, he will sing better and give a better performance.
BTQ: What was behind the chose for doing the opera song Nessun Dorma?
Steve: Well there is a history to that. Jeff was playing Italy in some large venue last year and someone suggested to him to perform Nessun Dorma. He thought it was the most ridiculous idea in front of hundreds of thousands of people. But he stood up and he played it and the audience went ballistic. So he thought lets just do it for the record, based upon this one gig. To capture his tone he has live the best thing to do I nothing. See, if you make a big deal about it, then he becomes conscious of it and then there is a problem. The only discussion we had about the guitar tone was asking him to just give a bit more sustain at certain points. The way he addressed this is that he used the whammy bar to change notes without having to strike the string again. A lot of the times he finds the harmonic and hits it without fretting the note. This makes the note ring longer as opposed to fretting it. He is constantly changing pick-ups, using the volume control and the tremolo bar. He’s always adjusting everything. Funny, he doesn’t even know he’s doing it. Amazing to watch from 3 feet away.
BTQ: How did the orchestra come into play?
Steve: We went to a studio in north London where they record orchestras, where the engineer knows what he’s doing. You can’t be flakey with orchestras, it’s not rock n roll, and you have to hit all on a certain time in the morning. All of the prep goes on before; it takes ages to get ready to record the orchestra. There are 2 types of ways we did it. First, where you have the orchestra record to the tracks already done and the second where the orchestra records to a click because there is no rhythm, the later is the tricky one. Tracks Corpus Christi Carol, Nessun Dorma and Elegy For Dunkirk I had keyboardist Pete Murray come in and play with Jeff. Then I broke the song into beats in Pro Tools, in another words I had to put a click to Jeff & the keyboards because there is no beat behind them, very time consuming. So when Peter goes and conducts the orchestra there is a click they can follow.
Great advice for recording such a guitar icon, let him do what he does best, play guitar! Steve admitted to me that he has oodles of analog gear still, but it is all in storage. He has successfully made the jump from the classic analog days to the full fledge digital era. Many of us are envious for Steve’s opportunity to sit only a couple of feet away from the great Jeff Beck and experience in person the wizardry he possesses over the guitar. Emotion & Commotion is a culmination of Jeff’s guitar voice and influence he has had on all guitarists through the years.
