BRIAN SETZER - Retro Cool

BRIAN SETZER
Retro Cool

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“It’s the way Brian likes to do it, because he likes to be in fairly close physical contact with the drummer,” notes Holbrook. “When we first set it up, I was a bit nervous about leakage, but it actually worked out. We had minimal screening around the drums, but we tried to keep it as open as possible.”

“We just get a kickin’ performance,” says Setzer. “There are no overdubs, just because I can never beat my original track. It has some kind of energy when I’m there in the room with Bernie and can see Mark.”

We just tripped them out. We went into that Pro Tools land, which is like, “Danger, Will Robinson!” I’ve never gone there! —Brian Setzer

After those trio tracks were recorded, the 13-piece horn section—five saxes, four trombones, four trumpets—came in on a separate day to lay down their parts. “They [were all] in the same room,” says Holbrook. “We put the brass on one side of the studio and the saxes on the other. I’d have one mic per horn. We’d submix them down to a few tracks so we’d have some measure of control. We used a lot of the old ribbon mics on the brass. We also rented some of these AEA [mics]—they’re a reproduction of an old RCA 44, which this guy Wes Dooley makes that are really good. So we used those on the trombones and RCA 77s on the trumpets. For some reason, I just think brass generally seems to sound better with ribbon mics. We used Neumanns [U47s, U67s and U87s] on the saxophones.”

Holbrook’s approach in the studio was to make it sound like the band was onstage. “When you see Brian live, across the stage you see the saxophones on the left; and then the bass, drums and Brian in the middle; and the trumpets and trombones on the right,” says the engineer. “It’s funny because—I have to make a confession—I had never seen them live when we did the previous album. I actually had the stereo reversed on a lot of the tracks on that record, just because of the way we had them set up in the studio. For a lot of [The Dirty Boogie], I mixed the saxophones on the right and the brass on the left. Subsequent to having seen some gigs, I said, ‘Oh, they go the other way!’ So, on this album, it’s mostly the other way, where the saxes are on the left and the brass is on the right. I just try to make it fairly natural stereo, but it is somewhat artificially created, because, obviously, they’re not all playing in the room at the same time.”

Following the recording of the horns, Setzer generally cut his vocals with a U47, and his tracks were processed with the Echoplex. Holbrook notes that, occasionally, the vocals were done before the horns; the situation varied from song to song. And although the making of the album took place over a few months, the engineer estimates that the actual recording took two to three weeks. Mixing took an additional week or so and was also done at The Village. Recorded and mixed in analog, Vavoom! was mastered digitally.

“It was fairly traditional as far as regular analog recording would go,” remarks Holbrook of the experience. “It’s trying to get a blend of the old and new really. I would use the old ribbon mics on the horn section, and pretty much we used fairly conventional mics for the rhythm tracks. On Brian’s amps, I liked to use a combination of microphones, like a Shure SM57 and a good old Neumann 67 tube. On the drums, it was a mixture of modern dynamics and old Neumanns.”

On Winchester’s upright bass, Holbrook placed a Neumann U47 FET and a Neumann KM84, direct-injected a MusicValve tube mic and used an AKG D-112 on the amp. For Dresel’s kit, the engineer used two mics on the kick—a Beyer M88 for the pedal side and an E-V RE20 for the front head—a Beta 56 on the snare, Sennheiser 421s on the toms, an AKG C-24 stereo mic as an overhead, KM84s for the ride cymbal and hi-hat, and U87s as room mics.

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