With Neill's assistance, Auerbach erected his own analogue home studio in Akron (later named Easy Eye Sound System), and in late 2007, the two convened in La Mesa to make Auerbach's first solo effort, 2009's Keep it Hid, with Neill serving as engineer and mixer. But once I met Dan, I knew right off that he was all ears and really eager to learn about how to make these kinds of records from the ground up.” "At the time I really didn't know what the Black Keys were about, other than they were a two-piece like the Flat Duo Jets and the White Stripes. "Dan liked what he'd heard on some of my records and asked if he could come by for a visit,” recalls Neill. It was Watson who would later recommend Neill's services to another old-school junkie, guitarist Dan Auerbach of the Akron, Ohio-based blues-rock duo the Black Keys. Neill used a characteristically minimal miking arrangement for Pat Carney's drum kit.Not surprisingly, Neill has served as mentor for many an analogue fanatic, among them UK engineer and long-time confidant Liam Watson, whose Toe Rag Studios (birthplace for the White Stripes' 2003 breakout effort Elephant) was created in conjunction with Neill. Neill's gear inventory only tells part of the story a sound historian of the highest order, Neill - whose promo pics depict a man who seems to have just beamed down from 1963 - can rattle off painfully obscure session detail from yesteryear on demand (knowing, for instance, where a song was recorded simply by the sound of the studio's echo chambers). He used these to outfit his moveable recording operation known as Soil of the South, which, since 1997, has occupied the former site of a two-car garage adjacent to Neill's home in La Mesa, California. One of them is Georgia-bred producer and engineer Mark Neill, who spent a good portion of the '80s buying up unloved tape machines, old microphones, mixers and processors on the cheap. But there are a handful of studio dwellers who cling to the belief that it's still possible to make records that don't sound like everyone else's. In 1979, the original MSS (at 3614 Jackson Highway in Sheffield) closed its doors to make way for a larger facility, and as other rooms from the era went by the wayside, that "fingerprint” sound began to fade. As co‑owner/guitarist Jimmy Johnson would later recall, MSS, like many great rooms from the time, was a studio with a "fingerprint sound”, the kind of place "where you hear a record on the radio and know immediately where it was cut”. That the sound of those early MSS recordings - gritty, mid-range drums and bass, vocals ever so slightly distorted - is still palpable today is no accident. Months later, the Rolling Stones, en route to their free concert fiasco in Altamont, taped future classics 'Brown Sugar' and 'Wild Horses' over three days in the Shoals, forever cementing the studio's reputation. It would become the first hit record to emerge from the casket-warehouse-turned-recording-enterprise known as Muscle Shoals Sound studio, opened months earlier by a group of local session players eager to bring the unique feel of the 'Shoals' region - a swampy blend of R&B and C&W - to the world. On August 16, 1969, singer‑songwriter RB Greaves entered a tiny studio located along a remote stretch of Alabama highway and cut 'Take A Letter Maria', a soul-tinged tale of marital infidelity (and secretarial retribution) that ultimately found its way to number two. Mark Neill at Muscle Shoals Sound Studios during the making of Brothers. But with all its equipment long gone, would engineer Mark Neill be able to recapture the studio's legendary sound? The Black Keys' Brothers was the first album to be recorded at Muscle Shoals in 30 years.
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