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Paul had a basic set of pearl Ludwig (as I recall) drums with a chrome snare. I can't remember exactly how they were miked, but it was a fairly simple set up (remember, we didn't have that may microphones), but I do recall that one of the mikes was high impedance, which was totally mismatched for our low impedance setup. We didn't know the difference then, and it ended up sounding fine. The family piano, a Baldwin Acrosonic upright, was definitely put through the ringer during our recording sessions. To get that "ticky-tack" piano sound on Do You Think About Me?, we pulled off the back of the Acrosonic, and proceeded to put a thumbtack on every single felt hammer, which took quite a while as I recall. I'm sure Paul's parents would have been thrilled! We also moved the piano all over the place for different songs...I can't remember why at the moment, but it certainly seemed important at the time. |
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 A late '60s Gibson Melody Maker bass pretty close to the way mine looked, minus the added bridge pickup. |
When I decided that my trusty Hofner Beatle Bass wasn't "cool" enough anymore, I traded it (and my Haynes Bass King amplifier) in on a single-pickup Gibson Melody Maker bass with a magenta-ish metal flake finish, which I promptly turned into a two pickup model by adding a Gibson mini-humbucker bridge pickup, so that I had a poor man's Gibson EB-3, the bass that Cream's Jack Bruce used. It was my first-ever guitar modification (something I'm still addicted to), which I unceremoniously performed with a hammer and a chisel. The trade was a pretty bad deal, really, but ultimately, it worked out well, because it turned out that the Melody Maker recorded beautifully when fed directly into the mixer, a technique I thought I had invented. To this day, I still marvel at how good the bass sounds on Bohob. As it turns out, those old Gibson Melody Maker basses are in high demand these days, although I doubt that one with an extra pickup squished into a chiseled hole would be worth much (except to me and possibly Bohob fans)... |
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Jon and I had an identical Framus "Texan" 12-string guitars. I wrote White Light, Flower and Andrea on my Framus (as well as many others). These distinctive sounding instruments have been the cornerstone of the 'Patron Saint' sound for almost 40 years now. I still have three of them.
Jon loved his Framus as well, but it was his Hofner Model 173ii 6-string electric which he truly coveted. Jon's family had lived in South Africa for a number of years, and he got it while they were there. He was a big Hank Marvin (of Shadows fame) fan, so his had to be bright red, just like Hank's Fender Strat! Anyway, it really contributed to Jon's unique sound...most people were using Fenders or Gibsons (if they could afford them) at this point. It had three single-coil pickups, a unique tremolo system and a great neck.
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I think Jon also borrowed what may have been a Gibson Jumbo acoustic 6-string for the album, as well. I believe he used a silverface Fender Twin Reverb amp for all of his electric guitar work (although, in retrospect, it may have been the same Fender Super Reverb he had back with the Patron Saints in 1967), along with a Dallas Arbiter Fuzz-Face (which I also employed on the bass for the middle section of Relax) and a Cry Baby wah-wah. When the bass wasn't plugged in directly, I recorded it by miking a Vox Essex bass amp. I can't remember all of the microphones we used, but I do remember using a cheap Sony F-98 dynamic mike for various things, including the piano!
Here's a photo of a Shure mixer, the M67, which is pretty close to what we used on Fohhoh Bohob, although ours had built-in reverb. If you listen closely to Jon's My Lonely Friend on the album, you can hear me manually riding the reverb with the mixer to produce a fairly strange effect on the tambourine.
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Oh, I almost forgot the autoharp and 5-string banjo. The autoharp, which was used on Nostalgia Trip and White Light, was, as usual, borrowed from an unknown donor. We would use anything we could find to produce unusual sounds, including a lamp neck and lampshape on Do You Think About Me?, which was also where the banjo appeared. Since none of us really knew how to play one well, Jon retuned it to standard guitar tuning for the song, and nobody was the wiser!
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