Song Facts
Single: “Blue Wind”
Album: Fretworx
Date Recorded: February 2008
Producer: Brian Tarquin
Engineer: Brian Tarquin
Assistant Engineer: Chris Ingram
Mixer: Brian Tarquin
Mastering Engineer: Chris Landon
Other Projects:El Becko: A Jeff Beck Salute, Get The Led Out! Led Zeppelin Saluteand Guitar Masters, Vol. 1 (various artists); Bob Marley Remixed and Junglization (Asphalt Jungle). Tarquin has also won two Emmy Awards for Outstanding Achievement in Music Direction and Composition for a Drama Series.
Single Songwriter: Jan Hammer
Mix Monitors: Event ASP 8 Studio Precision 8, Yamaha NS-10, Auratone
Recorder: Ampex MM-1200 Engineer’s Diary:
If you like your rock ‘n’ roll loud and your guitarists heroic, you will get on famously with Brian Tarquin and relish every release from his label, Bohemian Productions, a.k.a. BHP Music. An Emmy Award-winning musician heard on numerous television and film soundtracks, Tarquin’s real passion, it seems, is assembling the hottest players in rock and fusion to create unique releases such as the new Fretworx.
While some BHP releases are in tribute to the guitar gods (see El Becko, Get the Led Out and upcoming tributes to Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan), others, such as Fretworx, are subtly thematic. A portion of profits from Fretworx will benefit Friends of Firefighters (www.friendsoffirefighters.org), which benefits families of September 11 victims.
Brian Tarquin
“I grew up in Manhattan,” Tarquin explains. “There was a connection for me, to try to give something toward the rebuilding of the city after what went down. The whole record was in tune with that, in the names of the songs: ‘Triumphant We Stand,’ ‘Towers.’ I sought it out for each track, and had a specific guy in mind to record it. For ‘Towers’ I had Steve Morse in mind; for ‘Spanish Harlem,’ Frank Gambale. I thought his style and the way he expressed himself on the guitar fit perfectly. I always had Billy Sheehan in mind for ‘Blue Wind,’ which is off Wired from Jeff Beck, a song I thought we needed to do.”
For his blistering “Blue Wind” solo, Tarquin played a ’69 Les Paul Goldtop Deluxe through a Marshall JTM-45 head and 4 x 12 slanted cabinet. The cabinet was close-miked with a beyerdynamic M160, which went directly into the Trident Trimix console and Ampex MM-1200 2-inch, 24-track tape machine at Tarquin’s Jungle Room Studios. Six feet from the amp, he also positioned a Neumann M 149, fed to a Universal Audio 610 and directly to tape.
“When I mixed it,” Tarquin explains, “I put [guitars] through UREI LA-4s, and used the Eventide Eclipse for a slight ambient delay. I put Billy Sheehan’s track through this great old Trident parametric EQ, model CB-9066. It has a wonderful band sweep on it, and you can really dial in a terrific tone. I put him through that, and then compressed him through a [Universal Audio] 1176. I compressed him pretty hard, and then basically directly to tape.”
