Feature - Studio Pioneers
Many of the recording techniques we take for granted today were actually pioneered during pop music’s formative years. John Pickford explores a golden age of audio innovation...
Between the years 1962 and 1972 a revolution took place in sound recording and record production. In this feature, we’ll discover how a few maverick pioneers – alongside the most famous band of all time – invented recording techniques that have since become commonly used in studios worldwide. At the start of the 1960s, most pop recordings were made direct to single-track or at best two-track tape, with the band and singer playing live in the studio. All sound-balancing decisions had to be made before the record button was pushed. If extra parts were required, the existing recording would have to be dubbed onto a second recorder simultaneously with the new sounds.
By 1972, multitrack recording technology had progressed through three-, four- and eight-track to reach a then staggering 16 tracks. This enabled each instrument to occupy its own track on the tape and the final mix could be worked on at leisure, just as we do nowadays. In fact, if you listen to a typical 1962 pop record and compare it to one that was made ten years later, the overall sound quality is worlds apart. But compare a good recording from the early 70s to a modern equivalent, and the difference is not nearly as obvious.
In 1962 there were two pioneers who, in their own individual styles, were creating sounds that were streets ahead of the competition. In Britain there was Joe Meek; in the US it was Phil Spector. Famous for his trademark ‘Wall of Sound’, Phil Spector recorded multiple musicians playing live, often doubling or even tripling parts to create a full-bodied, cavernous aural assault that stood out when reproduced on the lo-fi radios and jukeboxes of the day. ‘Little symphonies for the kids,’ he called them.
Although Spector undoubtedly had a unique sonic vision, he had to rely on the skills of musical arrangers and sound engineers to achieve the results he was after. On the other side of the Atlantic, Joe Meek was taking on the recording business establishment single-handed, producing chart-topping records from a small converted bedroom in his flat.
As Britain’s first truly independent record producer, Joe Meek pioneered several recording techniques that are now common practice. Recording in such a small space meant that he could not adhere to the standard procedures of the major studios. Back then it was common practice to capture the sound of the instruments in the room with a minimum of mics.
Drums, for example, would often be recorded with a single microphone placed high over the kit to achieve a naturally balanced sound. But Meek wasn’t necessarily interested in achieving a natural sound and developed a close-mic’ing technique using four or five mics placed strategically around the kit. He always removed the front bass drum head and stuffed pillows inside to deaden the sound. Likewise, the snare drum and toms would often be covered with a tea towel. Sometimes he would dispense with the drums altogether and instruct the drummer to play the cases instead.
Blanket coverage
In order to avoid excessive spillage from guitar amplifiers Joe would cover them with piles of blankets; as for the bass, he built a unit that enabled him to directly inject (DI) the instrument into his home-made mixer. He was almost certainly the first person to do this. He also modified his upright piano, inserting drawing pins inserted into the hammers to give a sharper tone that would cut through the mix. All of these sounds can be heard on his masterpiece, Telstar, by The Tornados, a tribute to the world’s first communications satellite.
The track features the sound of a Clavioline – a small monophonic keyboard – that Joe overdubbed in octaves to create an ethereal, otherworldly sound. The harp-like sound on the record is, in fact, the tack piano, and the whole thing is book-ended by a montage of Meek’s sound effects, which contain the sound of electrical wires shorting, massively echoed percussion and domestic appliances that have variously been speeded up, slowed down and reversed. The results sounded like nothing that had been heard before and it became the first record by a British group to top the charts on both sides of the Atlantic.
The commercial success of Telstar – and its unorthodox sound – did not escape the attention of the major studios. In November 1962, with Telstar lodged firmly at No 1 in the charts, one of EMI’s technical experts, Len Page, sent a formal letter to all recording personnel at EMI’s Abbey Road Studios suggesting, “much more attention should be given to the production of gimmicks and special effects, especially for ‘pop’ recording”. Little-known to Page, a 45RPM single (remember them?) on one of EMI’s record labels, Parlophone, was also in the Hit Parade (as it was called then) at the time. It was the debut disc by a quartet from Liverpool that would go on to do more to push the development of record production than anyone else in the history of pop music.
Track count
It’s hard to imagine these days, but the first Beatles album was recorded in just one day (11 February, 1963), live onto Abbey Road’s in-house-designed BTR3 twin-track (stereo) tape machine. All of the instrumental backing tracks were recorded onto one track, with the vocals – performed simultaneously – onto the second track. This meant that the only mixing required was to adjust the relative balance between the backing track and the vocals.
Towards the end of 1963, producer George Martin began using a Telefunken four-track tape machine to record the group. Now they were able to double-track vocals and superimpose (EMI’s tech term for overdub) extra instrumentation to produce a richer sound. In 1965, Abbey Road acquired four Studer J37 four-track recorders. Around the same time, The Beatles’ production team (including engineer Norman Smith, who would later produce Pink Floyd) began to make ‘reduction mixes’ utilising two J37s. Once the four tracks of the first recorder were full, a mix would be created and bounced down to one or more tracks of the second J37, then further overdubs could be performed.
During this period, EMI’s engineers began using the now-legendary Fairchild 660 limiter (check out the Studio Icons feature in Issue 95). Apart from being used to track instruments and vocals, a limiter was permanently strapped across each four-channel output from the mixing desk going into the Studer J37, helping to glue together the many sounds on each track of tape.
Life’s a Beach
In early 1966, Brian Wilson – the genius composer and producer of The Beach Boys – began work on Pet Sounds, an album recorded on three-track and intended to eclipse anything The Beatles had achieved in the studio up to that point. Wilson was a huge fan of Phil Spector and adopted his approach of large ensemble recording. (Spector once remarked that he wished he had a dollar for every joint Brian Wilson smoked trying to emulate the Wall of Sound!) During the making of Pet Sounds, Wilson began work on Good Vibrations, a ground-breaking work that took several months and the use of four recording studios to perfect. Countless versions of the backing track were completed and the final mix was an edit of these vastly different-sounding takes. When it was released in October 1966, it significantly upped the ante in terms of what could be achieved in the studio.
Back at Abbey Road, The Beatles were just about to start work on what is arguably the most famous album of all time, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The first song recorded (although it never made it onto the LP, instead being released as a single in February 1967), was Strawberry Fields Forever, a recording that would surpass Good Vibrations in its complexity (see the ‘Let me take you down’ box).
Whereas their first album was recorded in a single day, the sessions for Sgt. Pepper spanned four months and almost nothing was done in a conventional manner. One sonic trick that was employed was vari-speed: the group had discovered that the texture of sound could be altered when speeded up or slowed down. Speeding up audio has the effect of sharpening the attack of notes, while slowing it down produces a gooier, dream-like effect.
Backwards (or retrograde) recording was also used extensively during this period. The track I’m Only Sleeping, from the Revolver album (1966), features a backwards guitar solo that took six hours to perfect. Once the required melody of the solo had been worked out, the sequence of notes was performed back-to-front with the tape reversed. When the tape was played back normally, the melody was as originally conceived, but with the added aural attraction of backwards sound.
Artificial intelligence
The technical engineers at Abbey Road were highly skilled and developed several effects to facilitate The Beatles’ ever-growing demands for new and unusual sounds. Chief Technician Ken Townsend built what he believed to be the first DI transformer box to enable instruments to be directly injected into the mixing desk, although, as we have seen, Joe Meek had been secretly doing it for several years. The effect so impressed John Lennon that he asked if his voice could be injected directly into the desk, to which George Martin replied: “Yes, if you go and have an operation. It means sticking a jack plug in your neck!”
Probably the most famous and imitated of all Abbey Road’s inventions was ADT – Artificial Double Tracking, a method that employed two tape machines to create a very short delay (around 40 milliseconds) that could not be achieved with a standard tape delay unit. Double-tracked vocals were a prominent feature of many Beatles recordings but it was a laborious task that could be difficult to get right. One evening in the studio, Ken Townsend overheard John Lennon asking George Martin if he could double-track his vocal without having to sing the song twice. Martin could not produce that effect but it got Ken thinking…
Townsend realised that the record/sync head on EMI’s mono BTR2 was twice the distance apart from the playback head than it was on the J37 multitrack. During mixdown, a pre-recorded signal could be taken from the record/sync head of the J37 and sent to the record head of the BTR2. With the sound now on both machines, the tapes run forward to their respective playback heads. With the BTR2 running at twice the speed of the J37, the signals emerge from the two machines at almost the same time, creating the effect of two distinct images.
A by-product of ADT was phasing. By making use of vari-speed, the two signals could be brought very close together indeed, so that instead of hearing the double-tracked effect of two sounds, a single, phased sound was produced. This is what we know as the comb filter effect.
Phased out
A further discovery was made when the vari-speed control was wobbled, causing the signals to move in and out of phase at various frequencies. The whooshing sound that resulted became a featured gimmick on many records from the psychedelic era. For an excellent example of this phasing technique (called ‘skying’ at the time), check out The Small Faces’ 1967 hit Itchycoo Park. It should be pointed out here that phasing wasn’t actually invented at Abbey Road. Les Paul, a key figure in the invention of multitrack recording, had discovered the effect as far back as 1945.
As pop recording became more experimental, with lavish productions featuring orchestral backing and all manner of exotic instrumentation, engineers required more than the standard three or four tracks. Les Paul had been running his custom-built eight-track since the 1950s, but it wasn’t until the late 60s that the format became the industry standard. Apart from reducing the need to make reduction mixes – bouncing between two tape machines – the main benefit of eight-track recording was the ability to separate sounds onto their own tracks, giving more options during mixing.
The problem with twin-track and four-track recording was that it was very difficult to create a good stereo mix. Listen to those early stereo Beatles LPs and very often you find all of the main instrumental backing panned hard left, with vocals and overdubs panned hard right. Many people enjoy the wild stereo mixes of the period, but at the time they were not considered as important as the mono mixes and accordingly were not given anything like the same care and attention. And just try listening to those early stereo mixes on headphones – very disorientating!
Although stereo mixes were prepared for all of The Beatles’ albums, almost no actual stereo recording was undertaken. For example, Ringo’s drums were recorded to a single track of the eight-track tape. The whole kit may then have been panned one way or the other, but (apart from on the last track on the band’s last recorded album, Abbey Road) the kit itself was not panned across the stereo spectrum. Stereo recording as we know it today didn’t really come into its own until the introduction of 16-track at the tail-end of the 60s, by which time The Beatles had split up. Glyn Johns, who worked with the Rolling Stones, among others, pioneered a great technique to record stereo drums using just three mics.
The developments in studio production techniques that The Beatles inspired created a divide within popular music. ‘Pop’ acts that relied on singles for their success continued to appeal to teenyboppers (now there’s a quaint old term), but the more serious artists – Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin and a whole host of progressive bands – expressed their art through albums, appealing to an older, more discerning audience. The Prog Rock era was upon us. At this stage of the game, musical arrangements and production techniques were becoming ever more lavish, and with the availability of the first synthesizers, a new era of record production had arrived.
After analogue
Sixteen-track recording caused a sea change in the way individual sounds were committed to tape. Engineers no longer had to commit to a balance of various sounds at the recording stage but could pretty much allow any mic (or DI) channel to occupy its own dedicated track. This was something of a double-edged sword, though, with some engineers hastily recording substandard sounds in the misguided belief that ‘we’ll fix it in the mix’.
Having said that, it is generally accepted that 16-track recording to two-inch tape achieved the highest fidelity of any analogue recording format. While the 24-track machines that appeared a few years later offered even greater flexibility in terms of overdubbing options, the extra eight tracks still had to be squeezed on to two-inch tape, reducing fidelity.
Now that we are firmly in the digital age, our options are almost unlimited. No longer do we have to worry about running out of tracks, editing can be carried out without the need for a razor blade and drop-ins need not be destructive – if you accidentally erase something, hit the undo button.
Almost all of the techniques and classic sounds mentioned here can be faithfully created with today’s software. Tape simulators, classic EQs and compressors are all readily available and once-esoteric effects such as phasing can be achieved at the touch of a button. Dig out those old LPs, listen and experiment to create new music with the techniques and sounds of rock and pop’s Golden Age.
This feature first appeared in Music Tech Magazine issue 96
Filed under
General Features,
Features
Sign in to download this article
New users, please register here
See also...
 MTM 107 |
25 Tips for Mix Processing |
MTM 107 |
Control for Live Performance |
|
 |
Music Tech Focus - Synthesis 2012 |
MTM 106 |
25 Pro Tips for Kick-starting Composition |
|
MTM 106 |
Contemporary Mastering |
MTM 105 |
Re-creating the Sound of Old-skool Dance |
|
MTM 105 |
25 Tips for Live Sound |
MTM 105 |
Mixing Tips from the Industry Pros |
