Barrie Cadogan

You just have to check the detail ; "Guitarist, Barrie Cadogan demonstrates the sounds and features of the JPF Regent Combo Valve Amp and has a bit of a noodle with his custom built Philippe Dubreuille Guitar."

When it came to laying down the guitar parts, Barrie turned to his black 1963 Gibson ES-345 that’s also seen plenty of action in his other role as guitarist in Primal Scream, with whom he’s performed since 2006. “First, I wanted to use my old ES-330, but it’s a little bit noisy. The ES-345 isn’t as noisy and it’s kind of similar, so I just went for that one. I always wanted a black Gibson.

“I was out with a friend and we said, ‘let’s go and have a look in Chandler’s.’ We were having a conversation about how we bothhad too many guitars and shouldn’t buy any more, and I walked in and saw this and I was like, ‘oh fuck! I always wanted a black Gibson.’

“Apparently, the guy who owned it before had it for about 30 years. The black refinish has worn away off the back of the neck and you can see the sunburst on the corner of the body, but it meant that the guitar was affordable. It’s a ’63, so it’s transitional, but the bridge pickup is a PAF.”

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Barrie “just cranked up the treble” on his custom-built JPF Regent 25 combo and plugged the guitar straight in, sans effects. It was a fortuitous decision, as drummer/engineer Virgil Howe – son of Yes guitarist Steve – recalls: “It was lucky we didn’t put reverb on. We used a Lexicon plugin, it’s really good. Then they asked for less reverb on the guitar, so it was a good thing we’d recorded it dry and were able to give them a version with less reverb, otherwise we’d have had to re-record it. It was really lucky.”

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The guitar sound was captured by a Sennheiser MD421-II microphone that Virgil likes because he can “get a lot more bass out of it,” and although he acknowledges that their studio approach wasn’t exactly scientific, the band have learned a thing or two about getting great guitar sounds: “We just stuck the mic up against the grille, there were no measurements going on,” Virgil reveals.

“No ambient mics, it was just straight in. At the time, we were just demoing, so we weren’t paying that much mind to it, but I suppose over the years we’ve found it’s important to record things as well as possible at all stages. If you record it well enough, there’s going to be a use for it down the line somewhere.

“It’s nice, it’s kind of an epitaph for this place – recording something that’s been used on something that’s gone global. It’s a nice way to wave goodbye to the eight or nine years that we’ve been here. I was here before I joined Little Barrie, so it’s been a long time. Barrie’s always said that the guitars sound good in here, there’s something about it. It’s a bit dead for drums, but we’ve found our way around that…”

Room for manoeuvre “It’s really good for guitars,” Barrie agrees. “You just get a lot of weight out of the guitar, without being muddy.

“We’ve found ways to create more of a room sound, sometimes by using reverbs to treat the master mix rather than the individual parts to create the illusion that you’re all in the same space. That’s what we’re trying to do sometimes; trying to get as much performance as we can into the recording and not have things sounding too separate or too fractured.”

When it came to recording bassist Lewis Wharton’s parts, the band again leaned on Barrie’s JPF amplifier. “Everything was the same,” Barrie remembers. “I might not even have changed the setting on the amp, we just left it.”

Recording bass through electric guitar amps is, of course, nothing new. However, it’s a studio trick that is often overlooked these days in favour of the massive bottom-end offered by modern bass rigs, which is something that Barrie laments: “Classic bass players from the past, like Carol Kaye, used to play through Fender Concert amps with 10-inch speakers. 12s are great for bass, too. A friend of ours from Nottingham plays that plectrum-style with flatwound strings, and he uses a Fender Twin a lot for recording.

“We’ve also used slapback echo on bass. There’s a lot of extra frequencies in modern recordings, which for some styles of music seems quite unnecessary.

“For dance music and stuff, you want all that super-low bass, it’s part of it, and people want to hear that and feel that when they’re in a club; but it’s like sometimes when we are on tour, you get to a gig and they’ve got all these sub speakers under the stage, and if you are a guitar band you don’t need all that super-low frequency.

“We’ve found that with mixing as well; taking a lot of the super-low frequencies out of kick drums, guitars and bass guitars, because they’re kind of irrelevant for the sort of music that we’re doing.”

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Lo-fi fans It’s clear that Little Barrie are a band who aren’t afraid to use lo-fidelity equipment in pursuit of a sound that excites them. Given Barrie’s earlier comments about his four-track sounding better than GarageBand and the fact that the band routinely use a Tascam Porta 02 that was a £40 eBay score as a preamp on one of the mics when recording drums, we delve further into his love of tape.

“Cassette’s got a sound,” Barrie insists. “It’s different to one- or two-inch analogue multitrack tape, it’s got a thing of its own. I really love the cassette sound. It’s the old Keith Richards thing, the old Phillips cassette recorder on Street Fighting Man. When you haven’t got the luxury of lots of equipment, you try to find ways to create sounds that are more interesting.

“We’ve got a little amp that’s covered in paint, a little transistor thing; it’s great with fuzzboxes. It’s a Peavey amp that someone’s used as a painting stool while they were decorating. But with fuzzboxes it’s really dry, like a buzzsaw.

“We’ve even done bass through it. You can end up with absolute paralysis in the studio – you can EQ your guitar in an infinite number of ways. But if you think, ‘all we’ve got is this’, you start to work within that and you start to think, ‘well how much can we get out of this?’ Rather than, ‘let’s try plugin number 72’, you know?”

So how does it feel for the band, knowing that the recording they made within limitations in a small North London studio is now, thanks to the limitless viral potential of the internet, being appreciated worldwide? “It’s mad seeing all the little clips of people playing it on YouTube,” Barrie smiles.

“There’s even a big guy with a shaved head on the ukulele. It’s quite mad thinking there are people all around the world playing it.

We’ve had that with some of our other songs as well. There’s lots of people playing Surf Hell because it was on Rocksmith, the computer game.

“There was a guy from Minnesota with a cigarette in his mouth, and a tiny Japanese girl playing it on bass – the bass looked massive. I had a go on it on Rocksmith and I got a really low score because apparently I wasn’t playing it right!”

Visit Little Barrie’s official website for more.

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I primarily used my cherry-red, ’62 Gibson ES-330. But there were a lot of guitars lying around Edwyn’s studio, and I’d randomly grab one of them for a small part here and there. For amps, I used a Traynor Studio Mate, a Gretsch Chet Atkins, and a Fender ’69 Vibralux 2x10. All of the amps were chosen for their unique sounds. I loved the Traynor’s weird, dry sound—it sounded much like the ’59 reissue Fender Bassman that I play live. The mics were mostly old Neumanns—although the odd [Shure] SM57 was used, as well. We varied the mic placement to capture the sound we wanted: in front, in back, sometimes close, sometimes far.

“I had a Les Paul TV Special for a while, a single-cut one. It was good, but then a friend of mine in the States told me about this guitar [the black Alnico-pickup Custom] and he knew who had it. We would sit around just talking about records and guitar sounds we liked and things like that. He helped me find that guitar and check it out.” How original is it? “Someone had put up a T-Top humbucker in the bridge, so it had been routed out and it was a refinished body and stuff. But it meant it was reachable, because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to afford it. But it had loads of potential. I managed to get hold of it, then took it to Gordon and Rob at Knight Guitars. They refilled the bridge pickup cavity [to fit a P-90] and put a repro pickup in there for a bit. Friends I knew from guitar circles helped me get other bits. Knight Guitars refretted it as well and did a cool job on that, and there were even some original caps – maybe bumblebee caps – in the case in a shitty state. But Gordon managed to get them working again and put them back in. “And then the guitar was up and running again and it was as it should be. However, later on I decided to get a Bigsby on it because I thought, ‘Well, it’s refinished and I use Bigsby a lot.’ I’d Bigsby’d all my other guitars, so then he found me the Bigsby. And then Martin Kelly said, ‘I’ve got an old P-90 I bought in a garage sale in America for $2. Do you want that?’ So then I had an original pickup. It was a Les Paul Junior one, so I had to change the plate and then the guys at Vintage said, ‘Do you want a cover? I’ve got the original cover.’ So they helped me get it a bit more original.

I primarily used my cherry-red, ’62 Gibson ES-330. But there were a lot of guitars lying around Edwyn’s studio, and I’d randomly grab one of them for a small part here and there. For amps, I used a Traynor Studio Mate, a Gretsch Chet Atkins, and a Fender ’69 Vibralux 2x10. All of the amps were chosen for their unique sounds. I loved the Traynor’s weird, dry sound—it sounded much like the ’59 reissue Fender Bassman that I play live. The mics were mostly old Neumanns—although the odd [Shure] SM57 was used, as well. We varied the mic placement to capture the sound we wanted: in front, in back, sometimes close, sometimes far.

“I was looking for something a little less powerful than my Bassman, but I still wanted 12-inch speakers and something near 25 watts, so we came up with this. “It’s got KT66 tubes in like the early Marshalls did,” Barrie explains. “I prefer their sound to EL34s – they’re a bit more like that 1965 or 1966 sound rather than Led Zeppelin. It’s a little clearer and not as grunty.”

In a photo on this Daily Mail article, Cadogan can be seen playing a Jerry Jones Electric Sitar.