Mike Campbell & The Dirty Knobs Capture ‘Vagabonds, Virgins & Misfits’ – Part One

Los Angeles, CA (October 16, 2024)—According to Martin Pradler, who tracked and mixed Vagabonds, Virgins & Misfits, the third album by Mike Campbell and The Dirty Knobs, the band comes by its name honestly. Some of the older equipment in former Heartbreaker guitarist Campbell’s studio, Hocus Pocus, like the 1970s-era Neve console, indeed has dirty knobs—which can sometimes render recording a mite challenging.

“I’d come in in the morning and it would be, ‘This tom mic is dead,’” Pradler explains. “It takes a minute to get everything back and work out the decades-old dirt. Every day is a little bit of a crap shoot. But it’s exciting! And it’s a testament to the fact that the studio was built so long ago. It’s like a tank. When you get it going, it’s like, ‘Oh, here’s the sound.’ So I don’t care if there are a couple of dirty knobs; I’ll wiggle them a little bit.”

At the same time, George Drakoulias—who co-produced along with Pradler and Campbell, the same team for all three Knobs albums—declares that he’ll buck the freeway traffic into the Valley any day for the amount of joy that greets him in that studio. In fact, he says, it’s his favorite place to record.

“When I was 15, I dreamed of a place like that,” Drakoulias says. “You walk in and it’s your teenage rock ’n’ roll fantasy. You have a beautiful, premier Neve console, you look to your left and there’s an awesome Gretsch, and two feet in front of the Gretsch is a Rickenbacker and everything is strewn about. It’s organized chaos, and everything you can think of is just there.

“The control room is big. The drum room is kinda small but has a high ceiling so it has a great sound,” he continues. “There’s an amp in the bathroom, one in the lounge, there’s an old EMT plate in the garage. There are chickens, pigs and turkeys in the back; it’s just the greatest place in the world. He just set up a back room and there’s a guitar carousel where the guitars are hanging, like at the dry cleaners—and everything is always set up and hot, so if you have an idea, you can just chase it down.”

For Knobs sessions, Pradler says, all the musicians set up in the large control room except drummer Matt Laug, who unsurprisingly set up in the drum room. Campbell put his rig as close to the studio glass as possible to be near those drums, while guitarist Chris Holt and bassist Lance Morrison were positioned behind Pradler, listening to the mix going down.

LIVE IN THE CONTROL ROOM

With nearly everyone in the control room, any miking scheme was going to prove challenging. In the drum room, Pradler set up a Neumann U 87, EV RE20 and a Yamaha NS10 woofer on the kick, Shure SM57s on the snare and AKG 421s on the toms. He believes there was a Sony C-37 on the hi-hat, with U67s for room mics augmented by a vintage RCA 44-BX ribbon mic going through an old RCA BA-6A limiter. All the drum mics went through Neve 1073s. Campbell’s vocal chain is pretty streamlined: a Shure SM7 into a dbx 1066, through a UA 1176, then straight to Record. For a couple of songs, they may have used an AKG C12 in overdubs, but mostly Pradler sticks to the SM7. “We tend to punch into tracks way later for a word or a line here and there, and I need this to stay consistent,” he explains.

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“For any piano tracks, it’s an SM 69 stereo Neumann,” he continues. “That, and some of the other overdub tracks like mellotron, pump organ or anything I need to grab a DI track from, lives in the Soundcraft Series 1600 console. We monitor mostly on Barefoot Sound MicroMain27s, and we have a giant curved TV acting as a monitor for Pro Tools ’cause we are all blind.”

Having described all that, Pradler maintains that his job is not all that complex. “The sound is doing its job,” he says matter-of-factly. “When it’s happening, they make what I do sound really good. It’s them; it’s not me. It’s all Mike’s sound. I’m not doing anything crazy. Here’s a couple of mics, run it through the Neve, come up through two channels to Pro Tools; okay, thank you. Then it’s just a matter of hitting Record.”

COME BACK TOMORROW FOR THE CONCLUSION!