In 1993, while still a member of the re-formed Allman Brothers Band, guitarist Warren Haynes took on a couple of side projects, including founding Gov’t Mule with bassist Allen Woody and releasing his own 1993 debut album as a solo artist, Tales of Ordinary Madness. He was happy with it at the time, but as the years went by, Haynes began wondering, “What if it hadn’t been mixed in the early ’90s, when the style was a little glossier, with more reverb, a little more EQ, a bit more compression?” What if he took a more organic approach and created a more timeless sound?
As the 30th anniversary neared, he called Megaforce Records and found that they had been thinking the same thing. Together, they called producer/engineer Jim Scott, who he had worked with on Ashes & Dust in 2015. Scott, Haynes says, knew exactly what he was talking about, so they sent him the 23 tracks, transferred from the master tapes to Pro Tools, and Scott pulled them up on his 32-input Neve 8048.
• Cover Story: Warren Haynes Just Likes To Make Music, Part 1
“Right away, I hear a classic drum sound,” Scott recalls. “A perfect kick drum, a perfect snare drum. The cymbals are sweet. He’s hitting it really, really nice. It’s loud. And it’s got a great room sound; that’s not me dialing up a digital room and saying, ‘Oh, I think this would sound good on the snare drum.’ I’ve never been to Triclops [Sound Studios, Atlanta] where they recorded it, but I know they had a Neve console, a Studer tape recorder and Neumann mics, and I know they had a couple of guys who, believe me, it was not the first record that they ever engineered. It sounded like a master class in how to record everything. I hear everybody in this record.
“On ‘Fire in the Kitchen,’ the guitar is just spectacular,” he continues. “And then on ‘Kiss Tomorrow Good-Bye,’ there’s piano, organ, four or five guitars, and then here come those background singers—nothing is better than that, you know, with three voices on one mic, not three mics. The sound that they recorded that day in 1992, that’s the exact sound of the record that I mixed. All I did was balance it, freshen it up, and give it a little sparkle and bits of clarity. And then, of course, Greg Calbi did a great job in the mastering.
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“Remember, this is a relatively new artist’s first record. He probably had only three days, a low, low budget, and not a lot of control. And it sounds spectacular.”