When San Francisco guitarist and
singer Chuck Prophet set out to
record ¡Let Freedom Ring! [Yep Roc]
last spring, he assumed a change of
environment, specifically Mexico City,
would inspire him and add some
manic energy to the album. He didn’t
count on periodic power outages
ruining takes at Estudio 19, the oldschool
studio he picked to lay down
tracks, nor a 6.4 earthquake shaking
the building’s foundations. And
nobody expects a pandemic.
“What I didn’t predict was that the
swine flu scare would start three days
after we arrived,” Prophet says. “The
CNN paranoia, if you crank that stuff
up to 11, makes everybody start to feel
a little off. People got itchy. We put on
blue masks and had a driver take us
to the studio.”
Also, according to producer Greg
Leisz, Prophet didn’t remember how
small (roughly 12 feet by 20 feet) the
high-ceiling main room was at Estudio
19. Reacting to his last record, Soap
and Water, which included sections
with arranged strings and a children’s
choir, Prophet wanted to dial things
down. The former member of ’80s
L.A. cowpunk band Green on Red
wanted a light touch and a raw performance.
Normally, tight spaces
complicate the situation. But with a
few deft arrangements of equipment
and a willingness to use bleed and
leakage to their advantage, the musicians
and engineers working on ¡Let
Freedom Ring! made it sound both
spacious and fully charged.
“People think isolation is the way
to go,” says Jason Carmer, who engineered
the album. “But getting the
bleed reinforces the stereo imagery.
You can hear the guitars from the perspectives
of all the mics in the room. I
find that the bleed gives you great
depth of field.”
The whole album was recorded in
one general formation in the main
room to help capture a live feel. While
there were some guitar overdubs
later, and pedal steel and fiddle tracks
were laid down separately to add
extra color and tone to songs like
“What Can a Mother Do,” the aim was
to capture raw performances.
Electrified opener “Sonny Liston’s
Blues” was a completely live take.
Chuck occupied the right corner. His
guitar, usually a Squier Telecaster,
which he favors for its simplicity,
was plugged into a pedal board and
run into an amp, usually a Fender
Princeton Reverb or a Vox AC30,
which stayed in the main room and
was recorded through a RCA 77DX
ribbon mic. An Ibanez AD-80 analog
delay was sometimes plugged in to
provide a vintage slapback feel on
some of Prophet’s solos. Baffles were
then set up to cover his Neumann U
47 vocal mic (run through a GML preamp
with a Urei LA-3A compressor),
chosen because the rich, warm sound
worked well with Prophet’s Tom
Petty-esque voice.
“Both the mic and Chuck’s voice
have character, so I wanted to capture
that,” says Carmer. “It helped deliver
the smashing, classic vocals of old records that we were looking for.”
Drummer Ernest “Boom” Carter,
who played on Springsteen’s “Born to
Run,” set up a borrowed ’60s Gretsch
drum kit across the room, miked with a
mono U 87 placed between the beater
and snare that “pulled it all in,” according
to Carmer, and added a spaciousness
to the recording. Guitarist Tom
Ayres, bassist Rusty Miller, and Leisz,
who occasionally added another guitar
line, squeezed in the middle of the
room. Their amps were placed in the
machine room or lounge, with doors
left slightly ajar to capture some bleed.
Everything was tracked according to
its orientation, says Carmer, which
meant they could capture the reflection
of the space.
To accentuate the live energy in the
room, lots of compression was added
to the guitar tracks via Neve 1073s and
UA 1176s. It really pricked up the guitar
lines snaking through the rave-up
“Where the Hell is Henry?”
“The general modus operandi was
to go for it and be aggressive,” says
Carmer. “[Compression] helped give
it an authentic feel but also trash it
up a bit.”
Prophet and others half-jokingly
referred to the studio as a state-of-theart
room from 1957, and while there’s
some truth to that, the studio’s cache
of vintage gear and mics added a lot
of character. A vintage Ampeg SVT
added powerful reverb, and Carmer
especially enjoyed using Pultec EQP-
1As on kick, snare, toms, rooms, guitars,
and bass. More importantly, the
somewhat cramped space—from the
overflowing studio to the courtyard
where they’d eat tacos for lunch—gave
them a sense of unity of purpose.
“There was so much chaos outside
the studio that when we got in there
and the power was on and we could
lay down a track, there was a certain
teenage energy,” Prophet says. “It
reminded me of being in the studio
with my first band.”