Don Was's 'Voodoo Lounge' sessions: Keith Richards' Fender Twin Reverb and Shure SM57

Don Was took the Stones back to a live-off-the-floor approach for Voodoo Lounge (1994), recording at Sandymount Studios in Ireland and later at A&M Studios in Los Angeles. He wanted to capture the band playing together in a room, not layering tracks endlessly. That meant getting the guitar sounds right at the source, not fixing them later.

For Keith Richards, Was kept it simple: a Fender Twin Reverb amp cranked up, with a single Shure SM57 microphone placed right on the grille cloth. That’s as classic as it gets — the SM57 handles the high SPL without distortion, and the Twin Reverb gives that punchy, clean-but-breaking-up tone Keith favored. No multi-mic arrays, no room mics, no digital processing. Just amp and mic, recorded flat. Was called it “the sound of the truth.”

The result is all over Voodoo Lounge — listen to “Love Is Strong” or “Out of Tears” and you can hear that direct, slightly ragged electric guitar tone that sits right in the middle of the mix. It wasn’t a novel technique in 1994 (pl