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| A young Ken Scott in the control room at Abbey Road. |
The recent release of Abbey
Road to Ziggy Stardust by legendary engineer/
producer Ken Scott (with Bobby Owsinski)
provides loads of insights on the making
of truly great albums. The book should be
extremely inspirational to home-studio engineers
and aspiring producers, as Scott details
the technical and creative applications critical
to the production of Magical Mystery
Tour and “The White Album” by the Beatles,
Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust and
the Spiders from Mars by David Bowie,
and many other tracks by artists such as Jeff
Beck, the Rolling Stones, Supertramp, Pink
Floyd, and Mahavishnu Orchestra. Here are
some exclusive, guitar-oriented excerpts for
GP readers.
The White Album
“At the end of one of the takes, I joked to
John, “God, the way you guys are going
the next thing you’ll want to do is record
in there,” as I pointed towards the relatively
small Room 2A. He didn’t say a
word. “Okay, new song. It’s called ‘Yer
Blues,’” John announced the next day,
“and I want to record it in there,” and
pointed towards Room 2A. “Me and my
big mouth,” I thought to myself.
The good thing was that the room was
empty, but it was so small that if one of
them turned and swung his guitar, he’d
hit someone else in the head. There was
so much leakage of all the instruments
into the mics that it was just a question
of doing the best you could to blend it
all together to get the sound, because
you 
couldn’t pull up the drums without
increasing the level of the guitars as well.
That said, I loved the drum sound we got.
What you end up hearing on the record is
what we heard during the recording. The
only thing we ended up recutting was just
a little of the vocal. You’ll notice if you
listen to the track that the sound of the
vocal completely changes about halfway
through the song. Where it changes is
where we recut the vocal. John said, “It’s
going to sound different anyway, so let’s
make it completely different.” That was the
way they were; it was, as I can’t emphasize
enough, all about trying anything.”
Hunky Dory
“Ronno [Bowie guitarist Mick Ronson]
was a Marshall man through and through,
and he used a Marshall Major 200 with
a slanted 1960A cabinet that was rarely
turned up full. I would always use a
Neumann U 67 or 87 just in front of the
speaker cabinet and occasionally a distant
mic. Mick got his sounds via a Cry
Baby wah-wah pedal that he’d move
slowly through its travel until he hit on
the right sound for the song, and then
he wouldn’t touch it again. The acoustic
guitar frequently played along with the
electric rhythm guitar to give the sound
of it a different feel. I usually miked it
with a U 67 or C 12A and compressed
it, sometimes quite heavily, with a UREI
1176 or LA-2A.”