Rick Rubin Day: Pt 4: Gotta have Neve

For a semi-talentless bedroom studio musician (which is the demographic this site is aimed at), Rick Rubin's recording techniques are pretty much unobtainable. According to this piece about Mars Volta, his technique is this: 1) Get a bunch of competent musicians. 2) Rent a haunted mansion in Hollywood. 3) Install vintage Neve mixing desk, huge Pro-Tools system, lots of vintage microphones. 4) Add 500 watts of monitoring, through ProAc speakers. 5) Record. The clever bit comes in rehearsal, when Rick helps the band to turn their incoherent jams into massive records (before Rubin, most hip hop records were 6-7 minutes long). But, Music Thing's job is to present objects of lust, so here is a vintage Neve mixer, currently at £205 on Ebay. I suspect it's not exactly what Rick uses, but at least it's got a built-in telephone, which you don't see so often these days. Sorry I couldn't be more help.

Posted by Tom Whitwell.

Comments:

I tried to have issue with the semi-talentless bedroom studio musician remark but then I realized that even without the semi it's totally ture.

# posted by

Anonymous : 2:27 am

ie: Rick recorded the Red Hot Chili Peppers rehearsing various grooves, right? So, outta a 1 hour dat (this is where I heard it) the bass line for Give It Away zips by (2 bars). I back it up a lil' and sure enough that's it. So I can safely say the tune created out of a loop. That was the early 90's technology that made us believe that the tune was played "live". I said to myself, "Rick is pretty good at seamless sampling and looping...shit."

# posted by

Anonymous : 3:45 pm

to anonymous regarding RHCP's Give it Away bass line:

Read Anthony Kiedis's Biography and you'd know that Give It Away was a jam that Rick turned to a song. Watch the "Funky Monks" documentary about them recording the Blood Sugar album (in the same house that the Mars Volta recorded their album in, mentioned in the musicthing article) and you watch Flea record that bassline (and it's not looped).

Or just listen to the song and notice that almost every time that riff is played it's played differently.

# posted by

Anonymous : 5:36 pm