How the Stones Built the Urgency of 'Get Off of My Cloud' with Double-Time Drums and Layered Guitars, Plus Charlie Watts’s Microphone Rig

Recorded in September 1965 at RCA Studios in Hollywood, “Get Off of My Cloud” was the Stones’ answer to the pressure of following up “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” The song’s frantic drive comes from Charlie Watts playing a double-time hi-hat pattern and snare backbeat—almost twice the tempo of the basic groove—while Keith Richards layered two guitar tracks: a distorted, syncopated riff on a Gibson Firebird V and a cleaner, chordal part on an Epiphone Casino. The mix of those tracks, with the riff panned hard right and the chords left, creates a churning, claustrophobic feel.

For Watts’s drum kit, engineer Dave Hassinger used a single Neumann U67 condenser as the overhead, positioned about three feet above the kit, pointed at the snare-head center. The kick drum had an AKG D12 placed just inside the front head,