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"It is an unusual situation," says Jon Jacobs about his working partnership co-engineering with Geoff Emerick. "On most of the projects I'm involved with I am the engineer and things go my way, but when I work with Geoff it's often a different story. You see, he's not always as in favour of the new technology as I am. We challenge each other, and you can be sure that we'll come up with a different result than if he had done it his way on his own or if I had done it my way on my own."
Geoff Emerick, of course, is the legendary engineer who worked on many of The Beatles' most revolutionary recordings. An innovator of studio techniques that are often still applied today, he exerted a a major influence on the career of Jon Jacobs when Jon worked as his assistant during the '80s. "Geoff taught me a lot about miking techniques, acquiring sounds, and so on," he confirms. Now, after nearly a decade of pursuing separate projects, the two men are working together again, on recordings with the three ex-members of The Beatles (the new tracks for the Anthology project — see the feature in the December 1995 issue of SOS for the full story), Elvis Costello and, most recently, Paul McCartney. Geoff and Jon have been on an equal footing while fulfilling different but complementary roles.
"Although Geoff was a great innovator during the early days of multitrack recording, a lot has changed since he started in the business, and he engineers from a very straightforward perspective," Jacobs explains. "He's only interested in the music, so I take care of a lot of the technical requirements. At the same time, Geoff oversees the sound and the overall balance, and while we often have different views on certain things, there's absolutely no conflict of egos between the two of us. There's always a way of finding the meeting between our points of view and we often suggest things to one another."
Back in the 1980s, John and Geoff teamed up with Elvis Costello for his Imperial Bedroom album. Then, after running into Emerick at one of his gigs about a year ago. Elvis decided that perhaps it was time for the two men to work together again. So it was that they recently co-produced Elvis' latest album, All This Useless Beauty, while Jon engineered and took care of matters technological. Lasting two and a half months, recording sessions began at the end of last summer at Windmill Lane Studios, Dublin. in a room equipped with a 72-input Neve V Series console with flying faders, and Studer A820 tape machines.
Costello had already rehearsed the songs with his band, and when the sessions were due to start, the entire ensemble was set up to record live in the same room. There were as few screens as possible, while for Elvis Costello a small self-contained booth with a roof was erected in the centre of the live area. Jacobs: "It is of paramount importance for an artist to feel comfortable. Most studios are just an austere environment in which the session has to forge its own personality. so if the attitude is good and the vibe is positive. it can make an incredible difference to the outcome." Positioned about 15 feet in front of the drum kit. the makeshift booth enabled Elvis to see everybody, and there was also some degree of control over the sound spillage. Still, this in itself created problems. "We were often trying for live vocals, but there would sometimes be
a lot of spillage from the drums into the vocal mic. Then, if we wanted to patch bits later with dropped-in overdub vocals, we might lose some of the ambience. I got around this problem by recording an extra drum ambience track, and for thin I used a mic positioned just outside the booth, with the same EQ as the vocal, in order to replace the kit ambience over any vocal drop-ins."
The main aim of the sessions was to keep everything as live as possible. "We recorded absolutely everything they played, because that band can switch ideas so quickly. The second they pick up their instruments you've got to be in 'record' on the multitrack, otherwise you could lose a one-off moment that they'd never be able to recapture." Nevertheless, there would often be quite a few different versions of each song recorded, while numbers that did not appear to be coming together with the band setup were treated to a more piecemeal approach. Jacobs: "We'd set up a drum loop of Pete [Thomas] playing and build everything on top of that with overdubs, sometimes replacing the loops with real drums once the song had taken shape."
For the live setup, drummer Pete Thomas was positioned at about three metres from the right-hand wall of the main room, with glass screens around his Ludwig kit. The bass drum was miked with an AKG D112 on the inside and a Sennheiser 421 on the outside. Jon has a personal preference for cutting a large hole in the front head of the bass drum. "I either like to have the head removed, or to take the front off it, otherwise you get a very choked bass drum sound. For some reason, a lot of people try to get the mic inside a small hole. To me, it seems that when you do that, the bottom end is cancelling out, because it's reflecting straight back off the front head. The low end seems to be phased out, leaving a limp sound with no middle punch. So I tend to cut a large hole so that I can move the mic about, and then send the assistant out to shift the up-front mic around until I get the sound that I'm after."
 For overheads, Jon employed AKG 414s, Neumann U87s, and STC 4038 ribbon mics, as well as Sennheiser 421s on the toms, a Neumann 84 alternating with an AKG 451 on the hi-hat, and a pair of U87s or 451s for ambients. On 'It's Time,' Thomas played a drum loop and a percussion loop to a click, and then these were sampled separately and mixed together inside the sampler. The result, referred to as the 'guide loop,' would later be broken down into individual elements and placed on separate tracks.
Immediately in front of the control-room window, in an area of the live room screened off by glass panels, Steve Nieve was seated at a grand piano, with a Hammond organ on one side of him and a Vox Continental on the other. Two Leslie cabinets were used for this setup - one each for the Hammond and the Vox — and sometimes even the piano was fed through one of them, via a Shure SM57. No DIs were used. Jacobs: "Steve could basically play live and use three different keyboards during one song. To my mind he is one of the best pop players of these instruments, and he hits the notes very, very hard indeed. In fact, he broke a string and we had to wait three days for a new one to be made and shipped out from England."
"I miked the piano with two AKG 451s: their positioning largely depended on the dynamics and range of what Steve was playing. For instance, when there was a lot of arpeggio piano, I tended to place the mics so that they were about nine inches from the dampers, right up by the front end of the piano, and facing slightly outwards. The Hammond was miked with two Shure SM57s on the top with pop-shields, because I had to get very close to the Leslie in order to keep out as much spill as possible from the drum kit. I used dynamic mics, as I didn't want the speed of the Leslie horn to pop the microphones with wind when running fast — which would have been the case if I had used condensers — and I also had a 421 on the bottom." The piano, Hammond and Vox were the main keyboards for the album, but there was some use of a Roland Jupiter 8 and a Solina string machine.
Meanwhile, in a screened-off area within the
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