Chords for Eddie Kramer's story behind "All Along The Watchtower" by Jimi Hendrix

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Wow, [Eb] when you hear that track, a couple of things come to mind.
You hear that slightly out of tune [A] 12 string, that's Dave Mason, but [Ab] underneath it there's
Jimmy [Eb] playing all the heavy rhythmic upstrokes and downstrokes on the 6 string.
[N] In the background you can hear very clearly and distinctly Mitch's drums.
You know that this is [Bb] a live [Eb] part of a live [Bb] take and [N] that sound of those two blended
[Cm]
together [Gm] _ makes that [Ab] one [Gm] stereo track.
Once again, [Ab] compressed, _ [Bb] EQ'd, [N]
there's no reverb on that that I can remember and I don't think
we actually [A] added too much reverb because we needed something fairly dry in the mix
[Cm] to [Gm] [Ab] keep that crispness.
It's an odd sounding [Eb] 12 [Bb] string.
I have no idea [Ab] which type of 12 string, whether it was a Gibson [Cm] _ [N] or who the hell knows what it was.
It could have been something that Dave Mason brought in or something that Jimmy had in
a case somewhere, who knows.
It's a really jangly 12 string and it's got a kind of a gritty sound to [Bb] it.
Certainly a lot of bass has been rolled off in order to let it sit in the track and not
_ interfere with the heavy bass end of Jimmy's guitar and the drums.
Let's listen to it again.
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[Cm] _ _ [Bb] _ _ [Ab] _ _ [Bb] _ [Cm] _
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[Cm] _ _ [Bb] _ _ [Ab] _ It's really cool to hear how the two of them are playing together when they finally locked in.
Dave Mason's doing that prrrring, prrrring, and Jimmy's doing the cha-ka-ka-ka-ka.
_ _ To me it's a wonderful moment in the song to hear those two guys just locking in. _ _
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_ _ [N] _ _ So it's the essence of the Helios console.
Couple of things are going on.
We mentioned before that Helios mic pre would break up quite quickly and I'm obviously over
driving it because it sounds almost like it's amplified.
It's not going through an amp.
I think I'm just pushing the envelope and driving it really hard so you get that slight
crunch on the acoustic.
And then of course the tape is being hit really hard too.
I can imagine the needles are banging off the end stops.
I think now on careful listening again I'm hearing just a touch of some kind of delay
but it's very, very, very faint.
Just enough to sort of make it maybe slightly bigger that we could have added at the very
end in the mix down process because this was transferred so many times.
It is very conceivable that I stuck something like that in there.
So if you're trying to recreate something like that in today's world there's a couple
of things you can do.
Definitely use the Waves HLS.
What we did was we tried to recreate the three elements.
The tape machine, the Helios mic pre and the pie limiter.
Of course they can't use those words anymore but it's HLS and PIE I believe _ _ correspondingly
for the pie limiter and the Helios.
The plugin is actually very nice.
I use it myself quite often.
Certainly in the EQ world you can't get it as a mic pre although I've heard some rumors
that somebody's trying to make a digital mic pre that sounds somewhat similar.
The way I would approach it would be use a normal mic pre, start to [Ab] gradually distort
the input just gradually, just enough [Bb] and then use the plugin for the EQ and you'll
get very, very, very close to that.
That's the best way you can simulate that in today's market.
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_ [Ab] _ In order [Eb] to get that kind of a sound not only are you using EQ [N] but it's the position of
the mic relative to the guitar.
I like to mic it if this is the hole of the acoustic guitar and the fretboard is here
and ends here I like to mic it right by the [Gm] fretboard probably about [N] two and a half to
three inches away.
I like to get really close so I'm trying to eliminate some of the boominess from the body
[Ab] of the [Gm] guitar.
Probably would have been [Ab] an AKG [Bb] C60.
It's a tube [C] miniature condenser [Gm] as well as a 67 or maybe it was a combination of maybe
the 67 [Eb] on [N] Dave Mason and the AKG C30 on Jimmy's guitar.
Little hard to remember from all those 50 plus years ago but that's what I think [Ab] it was.
The idea is get up away from the hole of the actual [N] guitar right by the last fret.
You're eliminating the possibility of extra boom.
So in today's market what can you find that's reasonably priced?
I'll give you kind of the same effect.
There's a mic that Shure makes called the KSM 141 and the idea there with this mic was
to combine the best of two microphones that I happen to like very much which is the AKG
_ 451.
Very bright mic, great for acoustic guitar, great for percussion and the Neumann KM184.
I like the KM184 which is slightly better I feel, more vintage one.
So what they do is combine the sounds of those two.
There's also a pad, there's a 20 dB pad and plus it's Omni and it's cardioid and it's
only 600 bucks versus big time difference you know with a 67 which is probably about
8 grand now on the new one.
Does a very lovely job on recording acoustic guitars, percussion, any of that stuff.
Just go online and look.
You'll find tons of them but I particularly like that KSM 141.
Does a lovely job mate. _ _ _ _ _ _