Ringo Starr—Inside the Making of “Look Up,” Part 5

Don’t Pass Up Parts 1 , 2, 3 and 4!

Billy Strings recorded all of his contributions onto three songs—“Breathless,” “Never Let Me Go” and “Rosetta”—on one day, in Sound Emporium’s Studio A, on June 4. BTW, on “Breathless,” that’s T Bone’s main driving guitar on the left, Daniel’s acoustic in the center, and Billy’s solo guitar on the right. T Bone added the building electric guitar part at the end later at Studio Z. And Bruce Sugar tracked Joe Walsh, at Joe’s home studio, on “Rosetta,” his slide accents heard between verses, while Billy’s lead is heard, sometimes doubling him.

The remarkable Paul Franklin tracked his beautiful pedal steel parts in a single day at East Iris Studio A. Says T Bone, “At this point, I think Paul is the greatest steel guitar player that ever lived—and that’s in a town with Lloyd Green and Buddy Emmons, all of them undeniably great. Paul brings an extraordinary sense of arrangement and orchestration to the steel that I’ve not heard from anybody else, ever.”

Franklin, Daniel notes, arrives at recording gigs with his own very specific rack of gear. “He’s very particular. It’s a big rack of equipment, and a lot of amplifiers and mics,” including his own Sennheiser 421, and two amps, though only one was used for recording here. “He’s very serious about his tone—as he should be. And his tone’s miraculous. He really brought an amazing sound to the album.” He appears on a good many songs—“Look Up,” “Time On My Hands,” “I Live For Your Love,” “You Want Some,” “String Theory” and “Thankful.” Another Nashville veteran, Mike Rojas, provides piano on two tracks—“I Live For Your Love” and the raucous “You Want Some.”

For the string arrangement on “Time On My Hands,” T Bone brought in arranger David Mansfield, a former member of T Bone’s 70s group, The Alpha Band. “I asked him for something like ‘Rose of Spanish Harlem,’ which comes in later in the song. Paul Franklin’s steel solo was already there, and he arranged the strings around the steel solo, almost like a double solo,” he notes. Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig, of Lucius, added their lovely harmonies to “Come Back,” as a late addition, tracked by Piersante, just prior to mixing, at The Village’s Moroccan Room, using Studio Z as the control room.

For “Look Up,” T Bone added a favorite effects part—backwards guitar, recorded by Piersante at Studio Z, just prior to mixing. “The first time I heard one of those was on ‘I’m Only Sleeping’ on Revolver,” He recalls. “I’ve always used backwards stuff. I love it, because you can’t control it.” Unlike Harrison’s use on Beatles recordings, T Bone skips the step of studying the backwards backing track and developing a part that would play a particular way when the part was played forward in the finished mix. “At this point, I just go with what I feel like—just ‘Let’s see what this does.’ And then you reverse it, and it’s a surprise, and it’s wonderful.”

While “Thankful” had been recorded the previous October, its tone didn’t match that of the rest of the record, so T Bone decided to replace all but Ringo’s original drum part and vocal, and kept Greg Leisz’s original acoustic part. He and Daniel then added a pair of electric guitars, a new Dennis Crouch upright bass part, and Paul Franklin added pedal steel. “We just wanted to bring it into the rest of the record,” the producer explains.

T Bone also added a new harmony vocal to the song from Alison Krauss, recorded by her own engineer, Neal Cappellino, at her and her husband’s studio in Nashville, The Dog House Studio. Also, Rebecca and Megan Lovell—Larkin Poe—tracked their additions to “Rosetta,” which included BVs, as well as a wonderful mandolin part by Rebecca on July 7, at their home studio. And with the addition of those two overdubs, recording for the album was finished.

MIXING

Once the overdubs were completed, Piersante did whatever further comping and adjustments might be needed, before mixing the songs at Studio Z, from July 15 thru July 30.

As with the production, Piersante keeps the mix simple. “T Bone and I have developed a sound, between us, over the years, that’s been refined, through both his taste and mine,” the engineer explains. “It isn’t any different an approach than we take with any other record. It’s referred to as ‘Ringo’s country album,’ but it’s really just a classic, bold and resonant sound that stays reverent the sound of The Beatles and Ringo himself.”

Again, as far as guests are concerned, Ringo is still the artist. “And that’s still about keeping it rooted in being a musician- and instrument-based approach to the production. And that’s where T Bone is king of all kings. Because he always knows how to pair people together, to have certain instruments influence a song.”

For Ringo’s drum sound, Piersante says, “Ringo doesn’t mess around. He goes in and plays, and sounds like Ringo. He’s got a comfortable place and an engineer he knows, and they get the sound they’ve always gotten. It’s an unadorned sound. And in a situation like that, an untreated small space, there’s a lot of room reflections and high end flying around in there. So my job is just to contour and fit it into something that’s going to work in the song, and not have a lot of masking going on.” He’ll vary what Bruce has captured, based on the song. “At times, you want to go bashy, with the rooms compressed and turned up loud—like ‘Breathless.’ That’s a basher, with loud acoustic guitars. You let your freak flag fly, take those bright rooms, smash them, turn them up, and make it really exciting. And then, other times, you want it tamed down a little bit, if it’s a more acoustic-based song, and you want that flavor to come through.”

As for placement, he keeps the drums as basic as the music in Ringo’s performance. “Ringo doesn’t play a lot of toms. But often, T Bone and I don’t like to see the floor tom way over here, and the high tom over here. We don’t like that, shooting around the stereo image. So we’ll keep the toms more in the center. But we’ll spread the overheads out, so there’s a little bit of a canopy of sound around the drums.” Notes T Bone, “I don’t like having the drums all over the place. When you watch a drummer play, you don’t hear the floor tom in one ear, tom tom in the other ear—you hear them in both ears.”

Staying reverent to Ringo’s sound on the recordings, Piersante says, is key. “Because Ringo liked it. And the songs were very much written specifically for Ringo—and the instruments take him into consideration. So it’s a matter of keeping his sound, as he and Bruce recorded it, and making it work with the instrumentation that was there.”

For stereo placement overall, he and T Bone like to stick with a classic sound—with clear hard left, hard right placement. “We like to do that—it’s classic. Because when stereo was invented, there weren’t pan pots on consoles—they were switched. You either put something on the left, the right, or in the middle.”

“Almost every record I’ve done,” the producer says, “the bass and drums are in the middle, as the foundation. And then, I clear out the middle, to leave that for the bass and drums. And I put one guitar hard over here, and another guitar hard over here. And put the vocals in the middle. It’s the way I’ve always done it. I like the clarity of it, the power of it. I love mono. And that kind of stereo is as close as you can get to mono. This guitar is mono on this side, and this guitar is mono on this side. And the drums are mono in the middle. It’s a hybrid stereo/mono approach.” Piersante will typically place T Bone on the left, with either Paul Franklin or Billy Strings on the right, with a Daniel acoustic somewhere nearby, consistently from song to song, always allowing the listener to recognize who is who.

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Piersante will also do as many engineers do, and play back his mixes on consumer devices and headphones (as used to be done, in the old days, with AM portable radios or cheap record players), to hear them how a typical listener will hear the mix. “Most mixes I hear on my iPhone speakers do not sound that good. iPhone speakers are frequency-limited and dynamically challenged,” he says. “But we listen to our mixes on there, too, and make sure we can hear the tone, hear the parts—and even hear the bass. I’ve got these beautiful Ocean Way monitors that Alan Sides built, and some midfield Neumann monitors, and the little Aurotone-style cubes, of course. But it’s important to hear the mixes on cheap tech, too.”

In addition to the stereo mixes created by Piersante, Bruce Sugar made Dolby Atmos mixes of the album’s tracks at Blackbird Studios in Nashville. “That’s one of the top Atmos rooms in the country, maybe the world,” he says. “It’s a George Massenberg room, with all wood diffusers. It’s an amazing room. And the immersive mixes really feel very emotional, which is important with a record like this for Ringo. You can feel his emotion in every song. And that’s what it’s really all about.”

“The key to Ringo Starr is that he is a musician, beginning to end,” says T Bone. “He is the most innovative drummer in the history of rock and roll. He is also a great, but somewhat under-appreciated, singer. But over, and under, all of that, he is also a strong force for good in the world.”