4/28/2025

Behind the Scenes: The making of Son Stone’s new album, “Dime Store Mannequin”

Many of my friends are musicians and many more are non-musician, music lovers.   They often ask me about the process of making an album, so I thought I’d take a dive deep into the details of producing Son Stone’s latest album, “Dime Store Mannequin”.

The songs on DSM have been “in process” for years.  Dan Doll, Jeff Brody, Ross Scheintaub and I have been playing some of them, like “Old Fashioned” and “Hangin’ On The Vine,” since before covid.  One of the tracks, “Jelly Ain’t My Jam,” was written only a few weeks before we recorded.   It’s been my dream to make a hard rock album with these cats.  One folk and seven Hawaiian Slack Key albums later, the time was right.   We had 15 songs ready to record.  We just needed to find the right producer. 

FINDING A PRODUCER AND A STUDIO:

Jeff, Dan, and I had opened for Jorma Kaukonen back in 2016 and Jeff had been taking lessons with the legendary Jack Casady for some years, so our connection to Hot Tuna goes back a ways.  One night after a Hot Tuna show, Jeff was backstage talking up the project with drummer and three-time GRAMMY winning producer Justin Guip.  Justin offered to take us on!  

A month later, we drove up to Milan, NY (near Woodstock) and crammed in three 12-hour days of recording.  The studio had the perfect vibe to get us grooving.  There were no dividers or Plexiglas .. we were all in the same space together. Kinda homey, kinda mystical, with a hint of incense.  It’s a small, two-level barn on top of a hill that had been retrofitted for recording.  And Justin is about as cool as you’d imagine a rock drummer to be.  He managed to get best out of each of us.  He yelled at Ross to turn it up, screaming “YOU DON’T GET TO SOUND LIKE NEIL YOUNG UNLESS YOU’RE AT 10 .. NOW DIME THAT THING!”  And for me, he used sweet-talk: “Yah Ben, you’re right there.  Let’s try it again and this time punch the first two words of that line.”  

We were all impressed with the tone he got on our instruments and with his arrangement ideas.  At the end of one song, he had us play a single chord (Bm) over and over for a minute.  We didn’t know what he was doing, but we went along for the ride.  Then Dan played a lead over it during playback and it sounded pretty good.  But that wasn’t where Justin was headed.  He took Dan’s lead and digitally flipped it backward.  All of a sudden Dan’s guitar sounded like Hendrix reincarnated!  We all fell flat on the floor.  (Check out the last 60 seconds of “A Lot Too Little and a Little Too Late” when the album is released.)  Justin even played drums on three of the tracks with us.  We hope to get the chance to record with him again.  (You can find Justin on Instagram at @JustinGuip and #MilanHillStudio.)

Here's a shot of the control room downstairs and the studio upstairs:

TRACKING, MASTERING, AND MIXING:

Next came tracking, mixing, and mastering.  We recorded each song several times.  Tracking is listening for the best “takes” of everyone’s playing and assembling them back into coherent songs.  Lots of digital cutting and pasting, like recording engineers used to do with magnetic tape back in the day.  Justin did some of this in real-time and some of this offline after we left the studio.  He sent us several versions and I collated all of the band’s comments and emailed them back.  It was an iterative process.  Jeff, Ross, and I also went back into the studio a few weeks later to redo some vocals and rhythm guitar. Then Justin brought in keyboardist and vocalist Will Bryant, who is currently touring with Joan Osborne.  Will added harmony vocals, keyboards, piano, and Hammond B3 organ and Wow!  He and Justin started grooving and you can tell they’ve done this before.   The album absolutely popped!

Justin prepared final mixes of each song and we listened again to ensure the levels were perfect (bass, vocals, guitar, drums, keyboards, etc).  Now it was time for mastering.  In the mastering process, an audio engineer (not Justin) adjusts the levels so that the volume and tonal qualities of each song on the album is within range of all the other songs.  The engineer also creates properly-formatted, production-ready wav files (16- and 24- bit wav, plus mp3s for the band).  And since the band wanted to cut a vinyl record, there’s an extra step needed to map out the sides of the album, spacing between each track, and spacing at the end of each side. (Mastering was completed by Alex McCollough at True East Mastering.)

Jeff and I arranged the tracks in the order we wanted, sequenced the time using a time calculator, and then listened to the end of each song and the beginning of the next song to ensure they flowed.  We also read several articles on album sequencing.

This led to some band drama.  Modern vinyl records can only be 22 minutes per side.  The quality is much higher these days than the records we listened to as kids and so the groove space on the vinyl is wider, meaning less minutes of play on an album. (Here’s a good video explanation and a good article for the techies.)  We recorded 11 tracks, which totaled 47 minutes of music, but we could only fit 44 minutes!  And each side had to be less than 22 minutes!  Which song or songs do we drop?  Heartbreak ensued in a split vote when we had to shelve two tracks we really liked.  The band came to agreement and the two tracks will be on the next album.

COVER ART:

While the album was being mastered, the band bounced around ideas for an album title.  I proposed “Dime Store Mannequin,” which comes from a line in “Jelly Ain’t My Jam” and I created some sample artwork (see above).  We all loved it.  I turned the cover art into a treasure hunt by adding in a dozen hidden items relating to lyrics in the songs.   The mannequin is obvious, but can you spot the pink monkey?  The bourbon bottle?  The coliseum?  The sphinx?  The grapes and wine bottle?  I spent more than 30 hours in front of the computer working on the album art.

For the back cover, I used a photo that Jeff took late one night as we were leaving the studio.

REPLICATION:

Not done yet!  I sent the whole project off for CD and vinyl replication.  That takes about 5 weeks for CDs and 3 months for vinyl.  At this time, I also sent the album off to a service that pushes to iTunes, Spotify, YouTube Music, Amazon, all the other streaming services. The album was digitally released on 5/26/2025, with singles coming out on 5/1 ("Old Fashioned") and 5/14 ("Don't Take Me Back Carleen").   

RELEASE:

The best part of this whole project is playing out live.  We’ve set our release party for 6/28 at an upscale barbeque joint in Patchogue, NY called BobbiQue.  We’d love to see you there!  We have several gigs leading up to that date and after.  You can check our gig calendar on this site.

ONE LAST NOTE:

Without you, our listeners and fans, family, friends, and fellow musicians, we wouldn’t be able to do any of this, and it’s something we feel immense gratitude for every day.  Thank you for listening and coming to shows!  We love you!!!