He Told The Live Room Guitarist His Tone Was Wrong — Nobody Told Him It Was KEITH RICHARDS

He Told The Live Room Guitarist His Tone Was Wrong — Nobody Told Him It Was KEITH RICHARDS

Richard Samuels produced 43 albums across a 22-year career. Richard Samuels won two Grammy Awards. Richard Samuels was known in the industry as a producer who said what he thought in his own studio and expected his opinions to be acted on. On September 11th, 1986, Richard Samuels said what he thought about a guitar tone to the guitarist in his live room.

The guitarist played the same thing again. Richard Samuels has described the 7 minutes that followed as the single most instructive 7 minutes of his entire 22-year career. Richard Samuels did not know who was in his live room until the 4-minute mark exactly. The guitarist was Keith Richards. Electric Lady Studios on West 8th Street in Greenwich Village had been one of the most significant recording facilities in New York since Jimi Hendrix built it in 1970.

By 1986, Electric Lady had been the site of hundreds of important recordings, albums that had defined careers, songs that had become permanent fixtures of the cultural landscape, sessions that had produced music that would outlive everyone involved in making it. Richard Samuels had recorded at Electric Lady before. Richard Samuels liked Electric Lady for the specific acoustic quality of its live rooms and for the particular atmosphere that a studio develops when it has absorbed the concentrated attention of serious musicians across 15 years of continuous use. Richard Samuels

had booked Studio B at Electric Lady for the afternoon of September 11th, 1986 for a session that was listed in his production schedule as a preliminary tracking date for a project that is not relevant to this story. What is relevant is that the session was scheduled to begin at 2:00, that Richard Samuels arrived at 1:45 as was his habit, and that when Richard Samuels arrived at Electric Lady, he found that the afternoon had changed from what he had planned.

The specific chain of events that produced the changed afternoon involves a mutual acquaintance of Richard Samuels and Keith Richards, a music industry figure named Danny Kay, who was not the actor, and who had a long history of facilitating introductions and arrangements between musicians and producers that occasionally produced significant results.

Danny Kay had called Richard Samuels the previous day and asked if there was any possibility of Keith Richards using a couple of hours of the Electric Lady session to work on something informally. Richard Samuels had said yes without thinking about it carefully because Richard Samuels said yes to most things Danny Kay asked, and because having Keith Richards in his studio for two hours was the kind of thing that most producers would say yes to without thinking carefully.

Richard Samuels had then gone back to what he was doing and had not thought further about it until he arrived at Electric Lady the following afternoon and found that the afternoon had already begun without him. What Richard Samuels had not thought carefully about was the specific order of the afternoon. The arrangement had been made in the assumption that Richard Samuels would arrive, set up, and then Keith Richards would arrive and they would begin.

The actual order was different. Keith Richards was already in studio B when Richard Samuels arrived. Keith Richards had arrived early. Keith Richards was, according to Marcus Webb, the engineer, completely set up and playing by 1:30 and had been playing quietly to himself for the 25 minutes before Richard Samuels came through the door.

Marcus Webb had let Keith Richards in and had been listening from the booth with the specific quality of attention that a recording engineer gives to something genuinely worth recording. Marcus Webb had not said anything to Keith Richards about the session arrangements or about when the producer was expected to arrive.

Marcus Webb had simply listened. Marcus Webb was very good at listening. It was the primary and most essential skill his job required. Richard Samuels came into the booth, set down his bag, poured himself a coffee from the pot that Marcus Webb had made at 1:15 in preparation for the session, and looked through the glass at the person in the live room.

Richard Samuels saw a man in his early 40s in a dark jacket with rings on his fingers playing a guitar through an amplifier with the absorbed focus of someone engaged in a private process that happened to be occurring in a professional studio. The man was good. Richard Samuels registered this in the first 5 seconds with the peripheral professional acknowledgement of someone who is simultaneously noticing something and moving on to the next thing.

The man was good, and the tone was wrong. The categorization of the tone as wrong happened in the 3 seconds after that. The categorization happened in approximately 3 seconds. Richard Samuels had been producing records for 22 years and had developed across those 22 years the specific and practiced ear for guitar tone that comes from spending thousands of hours in recording studios evaluating the relationship between the instrument, the amplifier, the room, and the microphone.

Richard Samuels knew what guitar tones worked in a recording context and knew what guitar tones did not. The tone coming from the live room was producing a specific kind of mid-range frequency content that Richard Samuels had trained himself to identify as a problem. A warmth that would muddy a mix, a characteristic that sounded appealing in a live room, but would translate poorly to tape.

Richard Samuels set down his coffee. Richard Samuels leaned forward. Richard Samuels pressed the talkback button with the specific decisive movement of a person who has formed a view and is acting on it. Richard Samuels said, “That guitar tone isn’t working for us. We’re going to need to change it before we start recording.

” Marcus Webb, the engineer, went completely still. Marcus Webb’s hand was on his coffee cup, and the hand did not move. Richard Samuels registered this peripheral response without processing it because Richard Samuels was looking at the live room rather than at Marcus Webb. In the live room, Keith Richards looked up at the ceiling speaker from which Richard Samuels’ voice had come.

Keith Richards looked at the speaker for a moment. Then Keith Richards looked back at his guitar. Keith Richards played the same thing again with the same tone, with the same mid-range frequency content that Richard Samuels had just said wasn’t working. Richard Samuels pressed the talk back button again.

Richard Samuels said, “I heard you play it. The tone still isn’t right. I need you to adjust the amp settings before we continue.” Marcus Webb said, very quietly and still without looking at Richard Samuels, “That’s Keith Richards.” Richard Samuels looked at Marcus Webb. Richard Samuels turned to look at Marcus Webb.

Richard Samuels said, “What?” Marcus Webb said, “The guitarist. That’s Keith Richards.” Richard Samuels looked through the glass at the live room. Richard Samuels looked at the man in the dark jacket with the rings on his fingers. Richard Samuels looked at the face. Richard Samuels looked at the specific way the man held the guitar and the specific way the man’s left hand moved on the fretboard, the characteristic movement that Keith Richards had been making for 30 years and that anyone who had been paying attention to guitar playing for 22 years

would recognize. Richard Samuels did not say anything for several seconds. Keith Richards in the live room played the same thing a third time with the same tone. Richard Samuels sat back in his chair. Richard Samuels looked at his coffee. Richard Samuels picked it up and took a sip and put it down and looked through the glass again.

Richard Samuels looked at the man in the dark jacket with the rings on his fingers. Richard Samuels looked at the rings. Richard Samuels looked at the face. Richard Samuels looked at the specific way the man held the guitar and the specific way the man’s left hand moved on the fretboard. The characteristic movement that Keith Richards had been making for 30 years and that anyone who had been paying attention to guitar playing for 22 years should have recognized immediately and had not.

Keith Richards was playing. The tone that Richard Samuels had identified as a problem was doing what it always did, producing that specific mid-range warmth, that characteristic frequency content that Richard Samuels had spent 22 years classifying as problematic. And Richard Samuels was now listening to it with the slightly different attention of a man who has just been informed that the person producing it has been doing so for 30 years and has produced some of the most recognizable and celebrated guitar sounds in the history of recorded

music. Richard Samuels sat with this information for approximately 30 seconds. Then Richard Samuels pressed the talkback button one more time. Richard Samuels said, “Take your time. We’re absolutely not in any rush.” Keith Richards looked up at the ceiling speaker. Keith Richards looked at it for a moment.

Then Keith Richards nodded once and went back to playing. The session that followed lasted 3 hours. Richard Samuels has described those 3 hours in various private conversations across the decade since 1986 as the most educational working afternoon of his career, not in the sense of being taught something by Keith Richards directly, not as a formal lesson conducted with the intention of correcting Richard Samuels’s understanding, but in the sense of having a significant assumption about what was correct and incorrect quietly and completely dismantled over

the course of 3 hours of listening. Richard Samuels sat in the booth and listened. Marcus Webb sat beside him and recorded. And Keith Richards played. The guitar tone that Richard Samuels had identified as problematic in the first 7 minutes of the session was, across the 3 hours that followed, demonstrably not problematic.

The mid-range frequency content that Richard Samuels had been trained across 22 years of professional experience to identify as a mix problem was, in the context of how Keith Richards used it, the way it sat against the other elements of the sound, the way it created space rather than filling it, the way it produced a specific warmth that was inseparable from what made the playing sound like it sounded, not a problem, but a feature.

A specific characteristic that was not incidental to the sound Keith Richards was making, but essential to it. A characteristic that removing would have produced a cleaner sound in the conventional sense and a lesser one in every other sense. Richard Samuels had spent 22 years developing an ear for guitar tone.

Richard Samuels had developed that ear through the accumulated experience of hundreds of recording sessions, through the study of the relationship between sound and the way sound translated from live room to tape to the finished record. Richard Samuels had made albums that sounded the way Richard Samuels believed albums should sound, and the albums had been received as sounding that way by the people who bought them and by the industry that recognized them with Grammy Awards.

Richard Samuels’ ear was, in the context of the majority of the guitar tones Richard Samuels encountered across 22 years, reliable and correct. What Richard Samuels’ ear had not been calibrated for was the specific case of a guitarist who had spent 30 years developing a tone that operated outside the standard parameters.

Keith Richards’ guitar sound was not a sound that followed the conventional rules of what translated well from live room to tape, and it translated perfectly. Keith Richards’ guitar sound was not a sound that avoided the mid-range frequencies that conventional recording wisdom treated as problems, and it was one of the most immediately and universally recognizable sounds in rock music.

Keith Richards’ guitar sound was, in short, a case where the conventional wisdom was wrong and the musician was right, and where the only way to know this was to have spent 30 years producing and listening to the outcome. Richard Samuels had spent 22 years in recording studios. Keith Richards had spent 30 years playing guitar. Those two numbers were not the same number, and they were not measuring the same thing.

Richard Samuels understood this by the end of the 3-hour session in a way that Richard Samuels had not understood it at the beginning of the 7-minute one. Richard Samuels has said that understanding the difference between those two numbers was the most significant thing he learned in 22 years of professional work.

After the session, Richard Samuels and Keith Richards sat in the electric lady lounge for a while. Richard Samuels said, “I should probably not have said what I said about the tone at the beginning.” Keith Richards said, “You heard something you thought was wrong, and you said so. That’s your job.” Richard Samuels said, “I was wrong about it being wrong.

” Keith Richards considered this for a moment. Keith Richards said, “Yeah, but you were paying attention. You listened to it three times before you stopped saying anything. That’s the thing that matters, that you kept listening. A lot of people would have come in and turned the amp down themselves.” Richard Samuels said, “I thought about it.” Keith Richards said, “I know.

That’s exactly why I played it a third time. You needed to hear it three times.” Richard Samuels has told the story of September 11th, 1986 to producers and engineers he has mentored across the subsequent years. Richard Samuels tells it to every producer and engineer he has mentored as a lesson about the limits of expertise, about the specific and necessary humility of understanding that a trained ear, however reliable in most contexts, operates within a set of assumptions that can be wrong, and that the best way

to find out whether your assumptions are wrong is to listen to what the music is actually doing, rather than to what you expect it to be doing. Richard Samuels tells it as a lesson about the difference between an expert and an authority, that an expert knows a great deal about what has worked before and can apply that knowledge quickly and reliably, and that an authority knows when the situation in front of them is outside the range of what has worked before and adjusts accordingly.

Richard Samuels was an expert on September 11th, 1986. Richard Samuels became, in the 7 minutes that followed his first talkback comment, something considerably more useful than an expert. Richard Samuels retired from active production in 2009 after producing 43 albums and winning two Grammy Awards and working with musicians across the full range of the rock and popular music world for more than two decades.

Richard Samuels is remembered in the industry as a producer with exceptional ears and strong opinions and the professional courage to act on both. Richard Samuels has said, in interviews given after his retirement, that his reputation for strong opinions was accurate and that he does not regret the opinions themselves, only the specific occasions when the opinions were formed too quickly before the listening was complete.

Richard Samuels had also developed, across the 23 years between September 1986 and 2009, the habit of pressing the talkback button to say something about a guitar tone and then waiting 3 more seconds before pressing it. 3 seconds of additional listening. 3 seconds of checking the assumption against what the music was actually producing, rather than what the assumption predicted it should be producing.

Richard Samuels has said that those 3 seconds have prevented him from making the same mistake several times across 23 years. Richard Samuels has also said that the 3 seconds began on the afternoon of September 11th, 1986 in Studio B at Electric Lady Studios when a guitarist in the live room played the same thing three times with the same tone that Richard Samuels had just said wasn’t working and did not say a single word while doing it.

Keith Richards’ guitar tone has never been described as problematic by anyone who was paying close enough attention for long enough. If this story made you think, subscribe and leave a comment below. Have you ever been completely and confidently wrong about something right in the middle of your own area of expertise? Tell us about it in the comments below.

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