Session drum ace Aaron Sterling might have fusion roots, but his bread-and-butter work lives at the top of the charts, where’s he’s featured on tracks by artists such as John Mayer, Taylor Swift, Harry Styles, and Lana Del Rey. He tells Cory what brought him to Los Angeles, why he’s “meant to be in the studio” instead of the stage, and he shares the surreal story of playing with EVH in a florist’s parking lot for Tracy Morgan.
Sterling defines his approach to recording in his studio as a “pedalboard approach” and explains:
“When guitar players started getting more pedals, in the old days, and then they started getting a pedalboard. And then there’s the rack. This was this evolution where you guys started controlling more and more of your sound and it was less waiting for a mixer to do interesting things later. And you were just like, ‘Here’s the sound.’ You have your own plugin, you have all this stuff that you’re doing to control your sound so that there’s less work later.
I got inspired by that concept when I started recording, even before I had my own studio, to give an engineer the most amount of stuff that’s done. So that when I started recording myself, my philosophy was always the pedalboard philosophy, which is I’ll give you the sounds, I’m not just gonna play the drums and let you do stuff later. I don’t wanna think of myself as a drummer. I’ll think of myself as a creator using drums to give you sounds that hopefully are the right thing for the song.
”Stick around for the drummer’s opinion of the Beatles’ “Now and Then” and learn why he prefers large cymbals.
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Rock recording has modernized since Sgt. Pepper. But has it improved?
Sgt. Pepper turned 50 in 2017. If he were American, he would have received his AARP invitation letter by now.
We know much about how the Beatles created the album, thanks to scores of illicitly released but widely available outtakes. But the outtakes included on this year's pricy “expanded edition" boxed set are particularly fascinating.
As most Beatles geeks know, Pepper was created on 4-track tape machines. They'd fill up one tape, mix it down to one or two tracks on another reel, and fill up the freed tracks with new parts. It was an awkward method that nonetheless produced great music.
But what if some of the music's magic didn't occur despite these primitive techniques, but because of them? Let's discuss what the newly released outtakes reveal.
They had a roadmap. The band and producer George Martin are famed for their studio experimentation. But the rough, first-take versions of these songs reveal that the team knew their destination before they rolled tape. The initial tracks leave abundant space for the parts to come, and the big picture is easy to perceive.
The drums don't drive. Unlike most rock recordings, where the drummer sets the pace and everyone else follows, Ringo plays sparsely, often letting Paul's keyboard define the feel. At times he stops drumming, or strips it down to minimal kick, tom, or hat. There aren't many fills, but when they do occur, they're the center of attention. Everyone else shuts up.
Also, the percussion parts vary over the course of a song—consistency be damned. Paul discussed this in a 2005 Drum! magazine interview with Robert Doerschuk: “On Beatles records you'd have a tambourine for a verse, then it would stop and a snare or something would take over.... I was always trying to do that in the '70s, but my producers would say, 'Just play the tambourine through the whole track and we'll work it out later.' And inevitably it would stay through the whole track. You'd have this record full of everything from A to Z—none of the instruments ever stopped. And that was boring."
No track scrubbing. Nowadays it's common to scrutinize each track individually before mixing. We remove clams and background noise. We align downbeats to the grid. By modern standards, Beatles tracks are a bloody mess. But all that mattered was how a performance felt in context.
It doesn't help that our modern DAWs depict sound visually, so it's easy to fixate on parts that are “wrong" because they don't align to the grid. But the Beatles crew worked with their ears, not their eyes.
Ultimate tone. That's a silly concept. Sometimes it feels like we've had our ears and minds poisoned by YouTube videos, gear demos, and online debates about “ultimate tone." But only one thing determines a tone's quality: how it suits the musical context. There's no better example than Sgt. Pepper's laser-bright electric guitars. Few modern players would be caught dead issuing such strident treble squawks. But they're perfect for these dense compositions.
Frankly, many Pepper tracks sound lousy when soloed. Ringo's kick has little impact. (On the drum-heavy “Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise) [Take 8]," you hear Paul hectoring Ringo to stomp the kick harder.) John's acoustic guitar sounds boxy and flat in isolation. But in the midst of a dense track, it feels and sounds great.
What matters most happens last. When you bounce tape, you lose high end and definition. While many modern rock records are built from the drums and bass up, Paul's bass was usually one of the last parts to be recorded. Sometimes drums were overdubbed as well.
Paul seems to be the most rhythmically definitive Beatle. In fact, his bass lines tighten the looseness of some initial tracks. When parts don't quite groove perfectly, it's often possible to add an overdub that triangulates between their feels, tying everything together. Paul's bass performs that trick over and over.
Space, the final frontier. Savvy musicians like to lecture about the importance of aerating your parts with silence, yet few today take the concept to Beatles extremes. In fact, many basic Sgt. Pepper tracks consist of little more than straight quarter notes, with the occasional open hat, guitar up-strum, or right-hand piano syncopation implying the swing. You know that Fadd9 guitar chord at the beginning of “Getting Better" that goes ching ching ching ching-a, ching ching-a ching ching? That's pretty much Sgt. Pepper's default groove. Funk, this ain't.
Burn the solo button! These observations share a common theme: The Beatles had their eyes on the final result, not the minute details of individual tracks. Nowadays we're addicted to the solo button. But since the Beatles crew was working with bounced tracks, they couldn't solo many of the parts even if they'd wanted to. It was about the forest, not the trees.
Few of us envy the travails of midcentury recording. It's nice being able to record 32 tracks on your phone! But it's worth pausing to consider the things we may have lost on our path to the present.
This low-budget replacement for a long-gone Gibson has its own winning qualities.
Every now and then I'll see a guitar on TV or in a magazine, and say to myself, “Yeah, I used to own one of those. It was a great guitar. Wonder why I sold it?" A Gibson J-160E was one of those guitars. The Beatles used J-160Es on all their albums. Years ago, I owned one from the '60s, but sadly let it slip away.
About six months ago, I ran across an Epiphone John Lennon signature model EJ-160E, but it had a few problems. The first was a tiny split in the wood at the soundhole near the pickup. The second was a tuning gear that was broken off at the stem. The seller had plenty of pictures, so I studied them thoroughly—especially the ones pertaining to the problems.
The tuning gear didn't bother me. I figured I could find a replacement easily on eBay. And the wood split wasn't a big deal, because it was not a structural split in the wood, only cosmetic, and looked to be only about 1/8" long in the pics. So, I sniped the guitar at the last minute, winning it for $200 plus $19.29 shipping.
The seller said he was out of town for a week, and asked if he could ship it upon his return. I said “no problem" and began looking for sources for a Kluson Deluxe tuner. I found that I could get a full set of the replacement tuners for $7.25, including shipping from China. I figured I could always use the extra tuners on projects down the road, so I pulled the trigger on a set.
This guitar's mini acoustic humbucker is pinned tight to the body end of the neck, which has a rosewood
fretboard with trapezoid inlays.
My tuners arrived a few days after the guitar, and changing out the bad tuner took only three minutes. What's interesting about the tuners I got from China is they're stamped “Gibson," while the original Epiphone ones are not.
Another interesting thing: This guitar has the lowest action I think I've ever encountered on an acoustic. And it's not just mine. I've tried other J-160Es and they were the same way. Way to go Epiphone.
Although it's a perfect swap-out, the replacement tuners Will Ray ordered from China bear Gibson's name. The guitar's original Epi tuners have no branding.
Bottom Feeder Tip #3171: Sometimes you can find a guitar with a flaw that can be easily corrected if you've got the skills. Changing out a tuner is pretty easy—especially if you're using a direct replacement.
So, how is the guitar? I really like it! It has become my go-to acoustic for songwriting, and playing it is easy as pie. It sounds good as an acoustic, and when plugged in it has more of an electric guitar sound instead of your typical piezo sound—likely due to its stock acoustic mini humbucker. Keep in mind, the pickup is a fair distance from the strings, so you can't exactly rock out like you can on a regular electric. Check out my sound sample and judge for yourself. It's a keeper.