Recording in digital marks a great leap forward, no doubt. The same band that might've invested $10,000 in an album a generation ago can buy a tricked-out Pro Tools rig and plug-in suite today, and record as many songs and albums as they want.
Digital has also proven a boon for studio owners, including yours truly. Many of us could never afford a Neve or API console or a 24-track Studer machine without a second mortgage.
Now, we have an army of plug-ins — including those licensed by Neve, API and Studer — and far, far more than 24 tracks at our disposal.
But it's true that the convenience and ease of digital have marginalized the best recording methods of the past half century, some to the point where they're on the verge of disappearing.
We should cover up the bloody computer screen and spend more time listening.”
One of the things I see more and more these days is that the recording process is done by looking at the computer screen as opposed to listening,” says Ken Scott, the legendary producer-engineer who has worked closely with The Beatles, David Bowie and Supertramp, to name just a few. We should cover up the bloody computer screen and spend more time listening.”
So listen” to these vintage recording techniques in your head as you read on. Try them out at home, or in a big studio, or the next time you see the bloody computer screen.” A very special thanks to Scott, who provided valuable background for this piece.
1. Tune in to out-of-tune guitars
It's never a bad idea to make sure instruments start out in the ballpark. But if you listen to Bob Dylan's classic Queen Jane Approximately,” guitar tuning wobbles all over the place—as in waaaaay all over the place. Now: Who'd dare fix that song today? Back in the day, tuning was done by ear to a piano, or with bulky strobe tuners weighing more than 30 pounds. If a band went from take-to-take or take-to-overdub without stopping to retune, this produced a chorus effect where guitar parts thickened the overall sound.
2. Stitch up A&B mixes
While working with Bowie, Scott developed a technique where a completed track was mixed in sections that shifted in sonic character. One way to think of this today is splicing” pieces of two separate mixes. Or three. Or four. Try not to automate your every move; approach each mix change separately, and organically, to close in on that way-back feeling.
3. Use Tape Speed for Octave and Key Changes
Scott says this technique is clearly heard on George Martin's piano solo on In My Life.” He recorded a half-speed piano, where you set the tape to 7 1/2 inches per second, play the part slowly, and play the tape back at normal speed.” Not only do timing differences get ironed out: When it plays back at the normal octave, it plays in a different timbre as well,” he says.
4. Mix at a Different Studio
Studio hopping was fairly common in late '60s London. When you go to a new locale to mix and/or master, you get a fresh perspective. It's especially wise to mix at a place that can upgrade your tracks with a leap in gear power. Be careful, though: Many a bonehead tries to fly a supersonic jet. Enlist a gifted engineer with fresh ears — one hearing the song for perhaps the first time.
5. Let it bleed
Track isolation took off in the 1970s, but many sterile recordings resulted. An overall rounded tone results when drums bleed a touch into guitar mics, for example. As you prep a mix with bleed, examine all the instruments as a unit first. The late Doug Fieger of The Knack related to me in an interview that tasty bleed helped the band mix My Sharona” in less than half an hour. And another factor for nailing that song was …
6. Do it Live
Too many Frankensteined” recordings have enough airbrushing to suggest an army of engineer-surgeons. When a band comes to your studio, have the courage to send the troops home for more rehearsal. On their return, cut multiple takes instead of one that you'll Pro Tool to death. As in days of old, the goal is to knit together an overall track that bristles with energy and even encourages you to leave in mistakes. What would Louie Louie” be without the frustrated drummer dropping his drumstick, and the f-bomb, at the 54-second mark?
7. Make Your Own Sound Effects and Landscapes
For the Supertramp song ”School,” Scott made field recordings of kids playing outside. Approach soundscapes with an idea of what you hope to capture musically. Kids playing have their own rhythm and abstract melody.
8. The Room is Everything
There's your Mystery Beatle, folks: the cutting room. Your extra musician” could even be your living room if it's ambient and makes the musicians feel great. A great recording rig, I would argue, comes second to a room that makes a performance pop and a band soar. Note that hardwood floors and high ceilings will add heft to your drums.
9. Create limitations
When four-track space was limited, engineers and producers made a reduction mix,” where three filled tracks were bounced onto one, and sometimes bounced again when the two freed-up tracks were used. This forced resourceful decisions. In an age of unlimited tracks, there's every temptation to think of recording without limits. But is that a good thing? To get extreme, would you rather record a guitar amp with one mic or 10? Think about how you can streamline, simplify and stimulate. Circling the band members around one mic worked for Bill Haley and the Comets, then decades later for the Cowboy Junkies.
10. Use a Sound's Qualities Over Sound Quality
Many of today's blues records, for example, take advantage” of digital by making squeaky-clean products worthy of a yuppie barbecue. Listen to classic records with buried snare drums (Otis Redding), distorted horns (James Brown), and overall lower fidelity ('60s Motown all the way back to Django Reinhardt). That doesn't mean to abandon clean recordings—just consider when a little bit of sonic sepia-tone can create a whole lotta character.
All music should touch your soul, your insides, and that's what we're not hearing today”
Make no mistake: High tech isn't the end of historical recording techniques: It's making creative history in its own right. But as we look ahead, it pays to look back and see what we've abandoned by the musical roadside.
All music should touch your soul, your insides, and that's what we're not hearing today,” Scott says. It should be loud and soft, and not all blasting your face. If it's a little off pitch or out of time, then that moves you — as opposed to singers going into the studio and saying, ‘I'll sing it once; you fix it with Auto-Tune and move it around so it's in time.'”
In other words, a heart-rending studio vocal or performance — even with its blemishes — has a better shot at being timeless.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Lou Carlozo
Lou Carlozo is a studio musician, engineer and producer based in Chicago and a former Chicago Tribune music editor and writer. In 2013 he scored and performed the soundtrack for the independent comedy We've Got Balls,” which won multiple awards on nationwide festival circuits.
Saturday, 15 July 2017
Monday, 10 July 2017
15 Of The Worlds Most Legendary Recording Studios
I was visiting London a few weeks ago and on a slow day decided to do the Beatles walking tour (which was inevitably called the Magical Mystery Tour”). The tour of course ended at the legendary Abbey Road Studios in northwest London, and I got to see no fewer than six tourists nearly get killed stepping directly into oncoming traffic while trying to catch the iconic crosswalk photo.
Modern music fans usually don't listen to music live, unlike our ancestors, who listened to live music exclusively. As I stood outside Abbey Road Studios and watched a 16-year-old Colombian girl weep at the site where the likes of Golden Slumbers,” A Day in the Life,” and All You Need Is Love” were recorded, I realized that a musical tour of the world — a tour of the songs that moved you to tears, or helped you through a hard time, or amped you up for a big moment — would actually be a tour of the studios, these often nondescript buildings that are typically hidden in plain sight in our cities. Here are some of the world's greatest studios.
Abbey Road Studios
The studio itself doesn't stand out particularly from the rest of the buildings around it, and it sits in a fairly quiet posh northwestern London suburb. If it weren't for the tourists crowding the crosswalk and the Beatles-related graffiti covering its outer gate, one might pass and never notice it. The most famous image of Abbey Road is of course the crosswalk right outside the studio. Vehicles in London are legally required to wait at so-called zebra crossings” as long as you physically stay in motion, so you can take as long as you like taking your picture, as long as you move in slow motion.
Aside from most of the Beatles albums, Abbey Road (formerly EMI Studios) is also the recording site of Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), Duran Duran's eponymous debut album (1981), parts of Radiohead's The Bends (1995) and OK Computer (1997), and Lady Gaga's Born This Way (2011).
The Dungeon
The Dungeon is probably better known for the hip-hop collective that was born out of it, the Dungeon Family. The Dungeon itself was a studio in producer Rico Wade's mother's basement in Atlanta, Georgia, but the collective has included some of the greatest hip-hop acts of the South and, consequently, of all time.
At the top left is the only picture I've been able to find of the Dungeon — pictured in it are the Dungeon Family and production-company founders of Organized Noize, Sleepy Brown, Ray Murray, and Rico Wade (from left to right). Probably the most famous members of the Dungeon Family are Big Boi and Andre 3000 (bottom left). Virtually all of Outkast's albums were recorded with the Dungeon Family. It's also the home of Gnarls Barkley, Cee-Lo Green, Bubba Sparxxx, Janelle Monae, and Future (pictured to the right with a Dungeon Family tattoo on his forearms).
Muscle Shoals may be best known for a song that wasn't recorded at Muscle Shoals: Lynyrd Skynyrd's Sweet Home Alabama.” One of the lines is Now Muscle Shoals has got the Swampers / And they been known to pick a song or two.” Muscle Shoals was formed when a band, the Muscle Shoals Sound Rhythm Section (nicknamed the Swampers) broke away from the great FAME Studios nearby and formed their own. While they've got a slightly bigger studio these days, it's still in the tiny town of Muscle Shoals, way off the beaten path in northwestern Alabama.
Even though the original studio looked like a roadside mechanic's garage, the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio would go on to record tracks for the likes of the Rolling Stones (Brown Sugar” and Wild Horses” from Sticky Fingers in 1971), Paul Simon's Kodachrome” (1973), Bob Seger's Night Moves (1976), the Black Keys' awesome Brothers (2009, at the new studio), and, of course, Lynyrd Skynyrd's first album (but not released till much later), Skynyrd's First (1978).
Trident Studios
It's hard to understate how important London studios were to rock ‘n' roll in the '60s and '70s, and high among those studios was Trident. Tucked back in an alley in London's posh Soho neighborhood, Trident is barely noticeable from the street, and it takes a little bit of searching to even realize it's a studio.
Relative anonymity aside, Trident Studios were responsible for the discovery of Queen and their first four albums, Queen (1973), Queen II (1974), Sheer Heart Attack (1974), and A Night at the Opera (1975), as well as James Taylor's eponymous debut album (1968), the Rolling Stones' Let it Bleed (1969), David Bowie's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars (1972), and Lou Reed's Transformer (1972).
On the other side of the world, we have Sunset Sound Recorders, on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, California. It was originally built for recording the music to Walt Disney movies, and you can thank them for Mary Poppins, Bambi, and 101 Dalmatians, but they went on to much greater rock heights.
Probably the most famous album recorded here was the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street (1972, and pictured above), generally believed to be their best ever, but it was also the home of the Beach Boys' best album, Pet Sounds (1966). My personal favorites, however, are Led Zeppelin's albums Led Zeppelin II (1969) and Led Zeppelin IV (1972), both of which were partially recorded and mixed here. Other famous ones include the Doors' The Doors (1967) and Strange Days (1967), Jet's Get Born (2003), the Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, and, of course, Macy Gray's On How Life Is (2000).
Headley Grange
Headley Grange is a former poorhouse in Headley, England, and it gets on this list for a single reason: its stairwell. During a recording session in the room next door, Jimmy Page was trying out the riff to When the Levee Breaks,” when the crew started setting up John Bonham's drum kit in the hall. He went out, start playing, and they recorded it from the stairwell.
The result is one of rock's best ever sounds. Bad Company, Fleetwood Mac, Genesis, and Peter Frampton recorded here as well.
Motown
Of course Motown is on here. Technically, the studio itself is called Hitsville, U.S.A.” (now a museum, pictured at the bottom), but the site was also the home of Motown's headquarters in Detroit, and as such I'm calling it Motown. It was without a doubt one of the most important recording studios of all time, and if you say the name Motown” now, it evokes an entire genre of music put out by Berry Gordy's Motown label.
Among the many great albums recorded at Hitsville are Marvin Gaye's What's Going On (1971) and Let's Get it On (1973), the Jackson 5's debut Diana Ross Presents the Jackson 5 (1969 — Ross and the Supremes are pictured at the top left with Berry Gordy), the Marvelettes' Please Mr. Postman (1961), and Stevie Wonder's debut, The Jazz Soul of Little Stevie (1962).
Electric Lady Studios
Electric Lady Studios (as you've probably guessed) was founded by Jimi Hendrix after how much it cost him to record his epic album Electric Ladyland. Hendrix was only able to use the studio for four weeks before he died, but the studio, in New York's Greenwich Village, is still very much in use.
We can thank Electric Lady Studios for Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy (1973) and Physical Graffiti (1975), Patti Smith's Horses (1975) The Clash's Combat Rock (1982), Billy Idol's Rebel Yell (1983) Weezer's eponymous 1995 album, Santana's Supernatural (1999), the White Stripes' De Stijl (2000), the Roots' Game Theory (2006), as well as a ton of Kiss albums.
Sun Studio
We've been focusing a lot on rock, so let's just get this out of our system: Sun Studio, in Memphis, Tennessee, was originally more of a blues outfit. But blues begat rock, and it begat it right in Sun Studios in the form of Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, and Johnny Cash, all of whom recorded albums here.
Aside from the founders of rock, Sun Studio also recorded albums for blues greats B.B. King, Howlin' Wolf, and Junior Parker. It closed for a while but then reopened in 1987, where, probably most notably, it recorded U2's Rattle and Hum (1988).
Studio One
It's called the Motown of Jamaica,” but really, it should just be called Studio One. Because Studio One is the home of reggae, and it doesn't need the Motown qualifier.
Founded by Clement Coxsone” Dodd (the man with the microphone) back in 1963, Studio One recorded albums for Bob Marley and the Wailers, Lee Scratch Perry, Burning Spear, and Toots and the Maytals. You're welcome, world.
Rolling Stones Mobile Studio
This one could get on here just for the novelty of having what's basically a truck with a recording studio in it, but it's actually been the site of a number of insanely good recordings. It was set up by Mick Jagger when he got sick of all the problems of using regular recording studios. They set up a studio in his home and then, so they could move it around, put a control room into this van.
We can thank the mobile studio for songs like Deep Purple's Smoke on the Water,” and — because it's mobile — for the most famous live recording of Bob Marley's No Woman, No Cry” — the one appearing on the posthumous Legend (1984). It also recorded parts of a number of Stones and Zeppelin albums, as well as Simple Minds' 1979 debut album, Life in a Day, and live performances by Patti Smith and the Ramones.
Capitol Studios
The home of Capitol Records, Capitol Studios gets on this list for the sheer breadth of the artists they've recorded here. All major record labels are going to have crazy amounts of awesome musical artists recording in their studios, but Capitol Records is best known for its echo chambers,” which are part of an underground concrete bunker designed by legendary guitarist and sound engineer Les Paul to get a better reverb sound.
The studios are most famous for being the place where Frank Sinatra did a lot of his recordings — his microphone is still here, and the band Bastille recently recorded on it — as well as being a home to Nat King Cole and the Beach Boys. But it wasn't just older music: Oasis, Daft Punk, Aaliyah, Outkast, and fun. have all recorded here.
Lee Scratch” Perry's Black Ark
Easily the most fascinating studio on this list is Lee Scratch” Perry's Black Ark Studio in Kingston, Jamaica. While not quite as mainstream, and definitely more low-tech than nearby Studio One, the Black Ark was known for Perry's innovative producing techniques, and also for his incredibly strange behavior. He was known for blowing ganja smoke into the tape decks, burying tapes, and spraying the unprotected tapes with blood, urine, and whiskey to bless” them. Eventually, after a few rough years of being extorted by gangsters, Perry covered the entire building in magic-marker drawings and then burned it to the ground to get rid of ‘bad spirits.' Other than producing many of Perry's own records (and basically inventing the ‘dub' genre), Black Ark gave us recordings from Bob Marley, Paul McCartney and Wings, the Clash, and Junior Murvin.
Hans Zimmer's Music Lair
You may not have heard of Hans Zimmer, but you've definitely listened to him. Zimmer is the German composer known for writing the scores to movies like Gladiator, The Dark Knight, Inception, and The Lion King. I've always been a fan of his music — try listening to The Dark Knight when you're trying to get some work done, it's second only to Daft Punk's Alive — but I never knew he had an awesome pad like this. It looks like what I imagined Hogwarts looking like. Yes, those are skull lamps, and those aren't bookshelves in the back — that's a synthesizer.
Chase Park Transduction
Athens, Georgia, has become synonymous with awesome music, and one of its most prolific studios is Chase Park Transduction. It's recorded the granddaddy of Athens rock bands, REM, as well as acts like Bright Eyes, Deerhunter, Animal Collective, and Queens of the Stone Age.
Modern music fans usually don't listen to music live, unlike our ancestors, who listened to live music exclusively. As I stood outside Abbey Road Studios and watched a 16-year-old Colombian girl weep at the site where the likes of Golden Slumbers,” A Day in the Life,” and All You Need Is Love” were recorded, I realized that a musical tour of the world — a tour of the songs that moved you to tears, or helped you through a hard time, or amped you up for a big moment — would actually be a tour of the studios, these often nondescript buildings that are typically hidden in plain sight in our cities. Here are some of the world's greatest studios.
Abbey Road Studios
The studio itself doesn't stand out particularly from the rest of the buildings around it, and it sits in a fairly quiet posh northwestern London suburb. If it weren't for the tourists crowding the crosswalk and the Beatles-related graffiti covering its outer gate, one might pass and never notice it. The most famous image of Abbey Road is of course the crosswalk right outside the studio. Vehicles in London are legally required to wait at so-called zebra crossings” as long as you physically stay in motion, so you can take as long as you like taking your picture, as long as you move in slow motion.
Aside from most of the Beatles albums, Abbey Road (formerly EMI Studios) is also the recording site of Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), Duran Duran's eponymous debut album (1981), parts of Radiohead's The Bends (1995) and OK Computer (1997), and Lady Gaga's Born This Way (2011).
The Dungeon
The Dungeon is probably better known for the hip-hop collective that was born out of it, the Dungeon Family. The Dungeon itself was a studio in producer Rico Wade's mother's basement in Atlanta, Georgia, but the collective has included some of the greatest hip-hop acts of the South and, consequently, of all time.
At the top left is the only picture I've been able to find of the Dungeon — pictured in it are the Dungeon Family and production-company founders of Organized Noize, Sleepy Brown, Ray Murray, and Rico Wade (from left to right). Probably the most famous members of the Dungeon Family are Big Boi and Andre 3000 (bottom left). Virtually all of Outkast's albums were recorded with the Dungeon Family. It's also the home of Gnarls Barkley, Cee-Lo Green, Bubba Sparxxx, Janelle Monae, and Future (pictured to the right with a Dungeon Family tattoo on his forearms).
Muscle Shoals may be best known for a song that wasn't recorded at Muscle Shoals: Lynyrd Skynyrd's Sweet Home Alabama.” One of the lines is Now Muscle Shoals has got the Swampers / And they been known to pick a song or two.” Muscle Shoals was formed when a band, the Muscle Shoals Sound Rhythm Section (nicknamed the Swampers) broke away from the great FAME Studios nearby and formed their own. While they've got a slightly bigger studio these days, it's still in the tiny town of Muscle Shoals, way off the beaten path in northwestern Alabama.
Even though the original studio looked like a roadside mechanic's garage, the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio would go on to record tracks for the likes of the Rolling Stones (Brown Sugar” and Wild Horses” from Sticky Fingers in 1971), Paul Simon's Kodachrome” (1973), Bob Seger's Night Moves (1976), the Black Keys' awesome Brothers (2009, at the new studio), and, of course, Lynyrd Skynyrd's first album (but not released till much later), Skynyrd's First (1978).
Trident Studios
It's hard to understate how important London studios were to rock ‘n' roll in the '60s and '70s, and high among those studios was Trident. Tucked back in an alley in London's posh Soho neighborhood, Trident is barely noticeable from the street, and it takes a little bit of searching to even realize it's a studio.
Relative anonymity aside, Trident Studios were responsible for the discovery of Queen and their first four albums, Queen (1973), Queen II (1974), Sheer Heart Attack (1974), and A Night at the Opera (1975), as well as James Taylor's eponymous debut album (1968), the Rolling Stones' Let it Bleed (1969), David Bowie's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars (1972), and Lou Reed's Transformer (1972).
On the other side of the world, we have Sunset Sound Recorders, on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, California. It was originally built for recording the music to Walt Disney movies, and you can thank them for Mary Poppins, Bambi, and 101 Dalmatians, but they went on to much greater rock heights.
Probably the most famous album recorded here was the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street (1972, and pictured above), generally believed to be their best ever, but it was also the home of the Beach Boys' best album, Pet Sounds (1966). My personal favorites, however, are Led Zeppelin's albums Led Zeppelin II (1969) and Led Zeppelin IV (1972), both of which were partially recorded and mixed here. Other famous ones include the Doors' The Doors (1967) and Strange Days (1967), Jet's Get Born (2003), the Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, and, of course, Macy Gray's On How Life Is (2000).
Headley Grange
Headley Grange is a former poorhouse in Headley, England, and it gets on this list for a single reason: its stairwell. During a recording session in the room next door, Jimmy Page was trying out the riff to When the Levee Breaks,” when the crew started setting up John Bonham's drum kit in the hall. He went out, start playing, and they recorded it from the stairwell.
The result is one of rock's best ever sounds. Bad Company, Fleetwood Mac, Genesis, and Peter Frampton recorded here as well.
Motown
Of course Motown is on here. Technically, the studio itself is called Hitsville, U.S.A.” (now a museum, pictured at the bottom), but the site was also the home of Motown's headquarters in Detroit, and as such I'm calling it Motown. It was without a doubt one of the most important recording studios of all time, and if you say the name Motown” now, it evokes an entire genre of music put out by Berry Gordy's Motown label.
Among the many great albums recorded at Hitsville are Marvin Gaye's What's Going On (1971) and Let's Get it On (1973), the Jackson 5's debut Diana Ross Presents the Jackson 5 (1969 — Ross and the Supremes are pictured at the top left with Berry Gordy), the Marvelettes' Please Mr. Postman (1961), and Stevie Wonder's debut, The Jazz Soul of Little Stevie (1962).
Electric Lady Studios
Electric Lady Studios (as you've probably guessed) was founded by Jimi Hendrix after how much it cost him to record his epic album Electric Ladyland. Hendrix was only able to use the studio for four weeks before he died, but the studio, in New York's Greenwich Village, is still very much in use.
We can thank Electric Lady Studios for Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy (1973) and Physical Graffiti (1975), Patti Smith's Horses (1975) The Clash's Combat Rock (1982), Billy Idol's Rebel Yell (1983) Weezer's eponymous 1995 album, Santana's Supernatural (1999), the White Stripes' De Stijl (2000), the Roots' Game Theory (2006), as well as a ton of Kiss albums.
Sun Studio
We've been focusing a lot on rock, so let's just get this out of our system: Sun Studio, in Memphis, Tennessee, was originally more of a blues outfit. But blues begat rock, and it begat it right in Sun Studios in the form of Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, and Johnny Cash, all of whom recorded albums here.
Aside from the founders of rock, Sun Studio also recorded albums for blues greats B.B. King, Howlin' Wolf, and Junior Parker. It closed for a while but then reopened in 1987, where, probably most notably, it recorded U2's Rattle and Hum (1988).
Studio One
It's called the Motown of Jamaica,” but really, it should just be called Studio One. Because Studio One is the home of reggae, and it doesn't need the Motown qualifier.
Founded by Clement Coxsone” Dodd (the man with the microphone) back in 1963, Studio One recorded albums for Bob Marley and the Wailers, Lee Scratch Perry, Burning Spear, and Toots and the Maytals. You're welcome, world.
Rolling Stones Mobile Studio
This one could get on here just for the novelty of having what's basically a truck with a recording studio in it, but it's actually been the site of a number of insanely good recordings. It was set up by Mick Jagger when he got sick of all the problems of using regular recording studios. They set up a studio in his home and then, so they could move it around, put a control room into this van.
We can thank the mobile studio for songs like Deep Purple's Smoke on the Water,” and — because it's mobile — for the most famous live recording of Bob Marley's No Woman, No Cry” — the one appearing on the posthumous Legend (1984). It also recorded parts of a number of Stones and Zeppelin albums, as well as Simple Minds' 1979 debut album, Life in a Day, and live performances by Patti Smith and the Ramones.
Capitol Studios
The home of Capitol Records, Capitol Studios gets on this list for the sheer breadth of the artists they've recorded here. All major record labels are going to have crazy amounts of awesome musical artists recording in their studios, but Capitol Records is best known for its echo chambers,” which are part of an underground concrete bunker designed by legendary guitarist and sound engineer Les Paul to get a better reverb sound.
The studios are most famous for being the place where Frank Sinatra did a lot of his recordings — his microphone is still here, and the band Bastille recently recorded on it — as well as being a home to Nat King Cole and the Beach Boys. But it wasn't just older music: Oasis, Daft Punk, Aaliyah, Outkast, and fun. have all recorded here.
Lee Scratch” Perry's Black Ark
Easily the most fascinating studio on this list is Lee Scratch” Perry's Black Ark Studio in Kingston, Jamaica. While not quite as mainstream, and definitely more low-tech than nearby Studio One, the Black Ark was known for Perry's innovative producing techniques, and also for his incredibly strange behavior. He was known for blowing ganja smoke into the tape decks, burying tapes, and spraying the unprotected tapes with blood, urine, and whiskey to bless” them. Eventually, after a few rough years of being extorted by gangsters, Perry covered the entire building in magic-marker drawings and then burned it to the ground to get rid of ‘bad spirits.' Other than producing many of Perry's own records (and basically inventing the ‘dub' genre), Black Ark gave us recordings from Bob Marley, Paul McCartney and Wings, the Clash, and Junior Murvin.
Hans Zimmer's Music Lair
You may not have heard of Hans Zimmer, but you've definitely listened to him. Zimmer is the German composer known for writing the scores to movies like Gladiator, The Dark Knight, Inception, and The Lion King. I've always been a fan of his music — try listening to The Dark Knight when you're trying to get some work done, it's second only to Daft Punk's Alive — but I never knew he had an awesome pad like this. It looks like what I imagined Hogwarts looking like. Yes, those are skull lamps, and those aren't bookshelves in the back — that's a synthesizer.
Chase Park Transduction
Athens, Georgia, has become synonymous with awesome music, and one of its most prolific studios is Chase Park Transduction. It's recorded the granddaddy of Athens rock bands, REM, as well as acts like Bright Eyes, Deerhunter, Animal Collective, and Queens of the Stone Age.
Wednesday, 28 June 2017
Chris Michie At AIR Studios The Tape
When Broken Barricades was started in late 1970, AIR Studios consisted of two studios (Studios One and Two), a mixing room with a small vocal booth (Studio Three) plus a film sound mixing room that was actually once used as a studio by the Third Ear Band, who recorded the soundtrack to Polanski's MacBeth in it. Broken Barricades was recorded in Studio One, which was a big room suitable for orchestral recording and film scoring (the film side of AIR's business took years to get going and was a bit of a white elephant). I think Studio One was modeled on Abbey Road's Studio One. Anyway, it was the first studio finished when AIR opened in summer 1970 and is where the first sessions were held.
I had been hired earlier that summer by studio manager Keith Slaughter, probably because I kept showing up during construction looking for a job - a real life example of the squeaky wheel getting the grease. For a few weeks or months I worked for Dave Harries and two other maintenance engineers called Bill (I think) and Danny, wiring up jackfields and pulling cables through the ducts between studio and control room. Already on staff were engineers Bill Price (from Decca) and Jack Clegg (from film scoring studio CTS). Ex-Decca engineer John Punter and tape-ops Alan Harris (ex-Morgan, I think) and Alex somebody joined soon after. Nigel somebody, Steve Nye and Simaen Skolfeld were all later hired as tape-ops, John Middleton was hired as a film sound engineer (though he also recorded half of Roxy Music's For Your Pleasure before the producer was sacked and Chris Thomas and John Punter took over) and the staff also included various receptionists, an ex-Abbey Road tea lady, and two porters, one of whom was a fantastically cheerful Jamaican, who would move the session players' instruments in and out (bands had roadies for that). I was the first of the original crew to leave, I think, though Simaen Skolfeld may have exited under a cloud after failing to turn up for a weekend Pink Floyd session - I found the band waiting outside the studio doors when I turned up for a session of my own, and as I later found out for myself, Pink Floyd did not suffer indignity in silence.
Multitrack recording has changed quite a bit since the '70s, but it probably changed more between Sgt. Pepper's.. and Exotic Birds and Fruit than any time since. Procol went through those changes, from 4-track for their first album through 8-track on Home , 16-track up through Grand Hotel and finally 24-track for Exotic.. (I've always assumed that the reason there was never a stereo mix of the 1st album is because someone had re-used the 1-inch four-track tape after the original mono mix had been finished - that stuff was expensive.
Does anyone know the full story?
There were many technical advances made during the few years between Broken Barricades and Exotic Birds and Fruit, but the general recording principles remained the same; only the tools changed. For example, though the AKG D12 (a dynamic mic) had been the traditional choice for bass (kick) drum in the 1960s and early 70s, it later became common to use an expensive, large diaphragm condenser microphone like the Neumann U87. Though the U87 had both 10dB pad and bass rolloff switches built into it, the accepted wisdom had been that the high transients and sheer SPL put out by a bass drum would likely tear the diaphragm from its surround, or at least produce a distorted signal. There may have been some truth to this theory, but it has to be remembered that until the 70s most studio engineers came up through a fairly rigid training and apprentice program. In the large company studios (Decca's West Hampstead, EMI's Abbey Road, Pye, CBS, etc.) the recording engineers were trained and managed by the maintenance engineers. A young engineer who used the "wrong" mics or abused the equipment in other ways would not do well in a work environment run by men in white coats. I am speculating here, but it seems probable that the habits of economy and "making do" practised in post-war Britain were carried on for some time by an "old guard" of technical engineers long after the fantastic growth of the recording industry had changed the rules. The Beatles had demonstrated that you could spend several months making a record, rather than several hours, and still make a profit, so it became less and less sensible for studio managers to refuse to let visiting engineers and artists do what they wanted - after all, the bills were now going to independent managers and record labels rather than to the studio's corporate parents.
AIR Studios was an independent studio, but it was run by managers and technical staff who had been poached from Abbey Road and Decca, so tended to have a rather stuffier atmosphere than other independents, like Trident, Island, Morgan and Olympic. There were, of course, occasional fire extinguisher fights and other isolated incidents of mayhem, but engineers and clients generally behaved rather well. During the day, of course, there were various technical and administrative people around, but after 6 pm there was usually only a night watchman and whoever was working in the other studios. But I distinctly remember the day that Todd Rundgren turned up with green streaks in his hair - that wasn't the sort of thing you saw in the corridors of AIR very often.
All this is a very long-winded way of explaining that as the years went by engineers developed more radical methods of recording. There were few, if any books on recording technique, so most engineers learned by watching others. On entering another engineer's session one would immediately listen for a moment and then say something like "nice drum sound." If it really was a nice drum sound, then a smart visiting engineer would figure out what the resident engineer was doing, and copy it. I still remember the drum-miking set up that I learned from an engineer who had copied it from Glyn Johns (long associated with Olympic). Since it's the mic setup that was (probably) used on Beggars' Banquet and Led Zeppelin (the first album), I'll describe here what was described to me. Snare and kick mic as usual, and I don't know which mics Johns favored. But instead of individual tom-tom mics, set close and pointing down into the drum shell, plus a stereo overhead pair, Johns set up only two kit mics, both Neumann U87s (or the previous model, the U67). One was positioned above the two rack toms at about the height of the drummer's forehead, the other at the (drummer's) right rear corner of the kit next to the floor tom and facing across it toward the snare.
Between them, these two mics picked up the entire kit and panning the two mics left and right gave a good stereo spread. It's hard to convey this now, but at the time I heard about this technique (and heard it demonstrated) I was very impressed. I had learned to engineer by watching engineers close-mic virtually everything (e.g. to mic a harp, you wrapped the mic in a sock or foam, and inserted it into the instrument from the pedal end), and the idea of an overall drum mix from two mics, supplemented by kick and snare "spot" mics struck me as radical. Of course, in the 40s and 50s engineers were careful not to put mics too near to percussion instruments, for fear that the transients would distort or blow out the diaphragms, so I was really only rediscovering an old technique. As the 70s progressed, drum sounds moved away from Ringo's muffled toms and the techniques of super separation (listen to Ken Scott 's early recordings of Billy Cobham). Partly because of Led Zeppelin's success, but also because their records were superbly produced, the open, crashing sound of John Bonham soon became more fashionable than the dry, padded drum sound typical of early 70s rock albums. Led Zeppelin's When the Levee Breaks has, I think, the most extraordinarily enormous yet somehow realistic drum sound ever recorded, and it launched a complete re-evaluation of the way that drums should sound on record, leading to a decade of ambience mics and PAs in the studio.
So, as I was saying, fashions in mics came and went. Bill Price and John Punter had trained at Decca Records' West Hampstead studios, so tended to follow the techniques they'd developed there. AIR was well-equipped with Neumann and AKG condenser mics and when Geoff Emerick came over from Apple he used the Coles 4038 ribbon mics he'd been using on Beatles records. (They were actually called something else then, I can't remember what, but Coles makes them now.) American producers would show up and be stunned at the number of Neumann U87s we had in stock, but they'd also ask for things we didn't have and be surprised we didn't all use Shure SM57s on snare. There was an AKG dynamic mic called (I think) the D212 that some people used on toms and bass and brass instruments, and an AKG 224 dynamic pencil mic that Tony Ashton insisted on as a vocal mic for a particularly disastrous (for me) Ashton, Gardner & Dyke session that I engineered for Gus Dudgeon.
DOLBY SIGNAL STRETCHERS
My guess is that Broken Barricades was recorded with the then-fairly-new Dolby A "signal stretcher" devices. These were big suckers, and 16 channels took up two full racks, each about four feet high. Eventually, the switching was automated, but for a significant period you had to manually switch each channel back and forth between record and play modes.
This was, of course, a job for the tape op, and a damn tedious one it was. I distinctly remember that the remix session for The Paul Winter Consort's Icarus album was a nightmare.
George Martin had produced this in America around the same time as the second Capitol Seatrain album, but Paul Winter had done a bunch of recording himself and wanted various tracks to be compiled from different performances - recorded at different studios with different musicians and different track layouts. Once the multi-track tapes were assembled, as each edit passed the playback head the bass would suddenly switch from track 1 to track 11 and the whole tape would go from Dolby to non-Dolby. Bill Price did the mix, sometimes a few bars at a time, exactly the kind of mind-boggling technical problem-solving that he could do in his sleep, while I tried manfully to keep up with the Dolby switching. I wasn't very good at it, but Bill seemed to think I showed promise and the other available tape ops weren't much better, so I stayed with the project.
If you want to hear how a Dolby encoded track sounds like when it hasn't been decoded, listen to Eno's first album. It was mixed by Chris Thomas and there's a track where they just left the Dolbys off when making the production master - it sounds all grainy and trashy and squished, which is presumably exactly what they were after.
24-TRACK
Though AIR was at the technical forefront in 1972 with 16-track recording (Pink Floyd came to AIR to finish the Meddle album on 16-track because Abbey Road was still only 8-track), 24-track soon became the next big thing. Studer had by this time figured out how to make a 2-inch machine (the A80?) and during the time I was away from AIR (February 1972 to September 1973) they must have switched the whole studio to that format. So Exotic Birds and Fruit was recorded 24-track.
Dolby's original eight- or ten-rackspace Signal Stretchers had shrunk down to a single rack space per channel and eventually wound up as cards, so 24 channels of Dolby A plus various channels for stereo and mixdown could easily be accommodated in a couple of equipment racks. Wherever a signal was going to tape, you patched it through Dolbys, and I remember John Punter using Dolby on the send and return signals to tape delay - before sending a signal to an echo chamber or EMT reverberation plate, it was common to delay the signal a few milliseconds by passing it through a tape delay machine. In true Abbey Road style, this setup had the acronym STEED for stereo echo, echo delay (or something similar). Similarly, ADT was for years the accepted shorthand for artificial (or automatic) double tracking.
I had been hired earlier that summer by studio manager Keith Slaughter, probably because I kept showing up during construction looking for a job - a real life example of the squeaky wheel getting the grease. For a few weeks or months I worked for Dave Harries and two other maintenance engineers called Bill (I think) and Danny, wiring up jackfields and pulling cables through the ducts between studio and control room. Already on staff were engineers Bill Price (from Decca) and Jack Clegg (from film scoring studio CTS). Ex-Decca engineer John Punter and tape-ops Alan Harris (ex-Morgan, I think) and Alex somebody joined soon after. Nigel somebody, Steve Nye and Simaen Skolfeld were all later hired as tape-ops, John Middleton was hired as a film sound engineer (though he also recorded half of Roxy Music's For Your Pleasure before the producer was sacked and Chris Thomas and John Punter took over) and the staff also included various receptionists, an ex-Abbey Road tea lady, and two porters, one of whom was a fantastically cheerful Jamaican, who would move the session players' instruments in and out (bands had roadies for that). I was the first of the original crew to leave, I think, though Simaen Skolfeld may have exited under a cloud after failing to turn up for a weekend Pink Floyd session - I found the band waiting outside the studio doors when I turned up for a session of my own, and as I later found out for myself, Pink Floyd did not suffer indignity in silence.
Multitrack recording has changed quite a bit since the '70s, but it probably changed more between Sgt. Pepper's.. and Exotic Birds and Fruit than any time since. Procol went through those changes, from 4-track for their first album through 8-track on Home , 16-track up through Grand Hotel and finally 24-track for Exotic.. (I've always assumed that the reason there was never a stereo mix of the 1st album is because someone had re-used the 1-inch four-track tape after the original mono mix had been finished - that stuff was expensive.
Does anyone know the full story?
There were many technical advances made during the few years between Broken Barricades and Exotic Birds and Fruit, but the general recording principles remained the same; only the tools changed. For example, though the AKG D12 (a dynamic mic) had been the traditional choice for bass (kick) drum in the 1960s and early 70s, it later became common to use an expensive, large diaphragm condenser microphone like the Neumann U87. Though the U87 had both 10dB pad and bass rolloff switches built into it, the accepted wisdom had been that the high transients and sheer SPL put out by a bass drum would likely tear the diaphragm from its surround, or at least produce a distorted signal. There may have been some truth to this theory, but it has to be remembered that until the 70s most studio engineers came up through a fairly rigid training and apprentice program. In the large company studios (Decca's West Hampstead, EMI's Abbey Road, Pye, CBS, etc.) the recording engineers were trained and managed by the maintenance engineers. A young engineer who used the "wrong" mics or abused the equipment in other ways would not do well in a work environment run by men in white coats. I am speculating here, but it seems probable that the habits of economy and "making do" practised in post-war Britain were carried on for some time by an "old guard" of technical engineers long after the fantastic growth of the recording industry had changed the rules. The Beatles had demonstrated that you could spend several months making a record, rather than several hours, and still make a profit, so it became less and less sensible for studio managers to refuse to let visiting engineers and artists do what they wanted - after all, the bills were now going to independent managers and record labels rather than to the studio's corporate parents.
AIR Studios was an independent studio, but it was run by managers and technical staff who had been poached from Abbey Road and Decca, so tended to have a rather stuffier atmosphere than other independents, like Trident, Island, Morgan and Olympic. There were, of course, occasional fire extinguisher fights and other isolated incidents of mayhem, but engineers and clients generally behaved rather well. During the day, of course, there were various technical and administrative people around, but after 6 pm there was usually only a night watchman and whoever was working in the other studios. But I distinctly remember the day that Todd Rundgren turned up with green streaks in his hair - that wasn't the sort of thing you saw in the corridors of AIR very often.
All this is a very long-winded way of explaining that as the years went by engineers developed more radical methods of recording. There were few, if any books on recording technique, so most engineers learned by watching others. On entering another engineer's session one would immediately listen for a moment and then say something like "nice drum sound." If it really was a nice drum sound, then a smart visiting engineer would figure out what the resident engineer was doing, and copy it. I still remember the drum-miking set up that I learned from an engineer who had copied it from Glyn Johns (long associated with Olympic). Since it's the mic setup that was (probably) used on Beggars' Banquet and Led Zeppelin (the first album), I'll describe here what was described to me. Snare and kick mic as usual, and I don't know which mics Johns favored. But instead of individual tom-tom mics, set close and pointing down into the drum shell, plus a stereo overhead pair, Johns set up only two kit mics, both Neumann U87s (or the previous model, the U67). One was positioned above the two rack toms at about the height of the drummer's forehead, the other at the (drummer's) right rear corner of the kit next to the floor tom and facing across it toward the snare.
Between them, these two mics picked up the entire kit and panning the two mics left and right gave a good stereo spread. It's hard to convey this now, but at the time I heard about this technique (and heard it demonstrated) I was very impressed. I had learned to engineer by watching engineers close-mic virtually everything (e.g. to mic a harp, you wrapped the mic in a sock or foam, and inserted it into the instrument from the pedal end), and the idea of an overall drum mix from two mics, supplemented by kick and snare "spot" mics struck me as radical. Of course, in the 40s and 50s engineers were careful not to put mics too near to percussion instruments, for fear that the transients would distort or blow out the diaphragms, so I was really only rediscovering an old technique. As the 70s progressed, drum sounds moved away from Ringo's muffled toms and the techniques of super separation (listen to Ken Scott 's early recordings of Billy Cobham). Partly because of Led Zeppelin's success, but also because their records were superbly produced, the open, crashing sound of John Bonham soon became more fashionable than the dry, padded drum sound typical of early 70s rock albums. Led Zeppelin's When the Levee Breaks has, I think, the most extraordinarily enormous yet somehow realistic drum sound ever recorded, and it launched a complete re-evaluation of the way that drums should sound on record, leading to a decade of ambience mics and PAs in the studio.
So, as I was saying, fashions in mics came and went. Bill Price and John Punter had trained at Decca Records' West Hampstead studios, so tended to follow the techniques they'd developed there. AIR was well-equipped with Neumann and AKG condenser mics and when Geoff Emerick came over from Apple he used the Coles 4038 ribbon mics he'd been using on Beatles records. (They were actually called something else then, I can't remember what, but Coles makes them now.) American producers would show up and be stunned at the number of Neumann U87s we had in stock, but they'd also ask for things we didn't have and be surprised we didn't all use Shure SM57s on snare. There was an AKG dynamic mic called (I think) the D212 that some people used on toms and bass and brass instruments, and an AKG 224 dynamic pencil mic that Tony Ashton insisted on as a vocal mic for a particularly disastrous (for me) Ashton, Gardner & Dyke session that I engineered for Gus Dudgeon.
DOLBY SIGNAL STRETCHERS
My guess is that Broken Barricades was recorded with the then-fairly-new Dolby A "signal stretcher" devices. These were big suckers, and 16 channels took up two full racks, each about four feet high. Eventually, the switching was automated, but for a significant period you had to manually switch each channel back and forth between record and play modes.
This was, of course, a job for the tape op, and a damn tedious one it was. I distinctly remember that the remix session for The Paul Winter Consort's Icarus album was a nightmare.
George Martin had produced this in America around the same time as the second Capitol Seatrain album, but Paul Winter had done a bunch of recording himself and wanted various tracks to be compiled from different performances - recorded at different studios with different musicians and different track layouts. Once the multi-track tapes were assembled, as each edit passed the playback head the bass would suddenly switch from track 1 to track 11 and the whole tape would go from Dolby to non-Dolby. Bill Price did the mix, sometimes a few bars at a time, exactly the kind of mind-boggling technical problem-solving that he could do in his sleep, while I tried manfully to keep up with the Dolby switching. I wasn't very good at it, but Bill seemed to think I showed promise and the other available tape ops weren't much better, so I stayed with the project.
If you want to hear how a Dolby encoded track sounds like when it hasn't been decoded, listen to Eno's first album. It was mixed by Chris Thomas and there's a track where they just left the Dolbys off when making the production master - it sounds all grainy and trashy and squished, which is presumably exactly what they were after.
24-TRACK
Though AIR was at the technical forefront in 1972 with 16-track recording (Pink Floyd came to AIR to finish the Meddle album on 16-track because Abbey Road was still only 8-track), 24-track soon became the next big thing. Studer had by this time figured out how to make a 2-inch machine (the A80?) and during the time I was away from AIR (February 1972 to September 1973) they must have switched the whole studio to that format. So Exotic Birds and Fruit was recorded 24-track.
Dolby's original eight- or ten-rackspace Signal Stretchers had shrunk down to a single rack space per channel and eventually wound up as cards, so 24 channels of Dolby A plus various channels for stereo and mixdown could easily be accommodated in a couple of equipment racks. Wherever a signal was going to tape, you patched it through Dolbys, and I remember John Punter using Dolby on the send and return signals to tape delay - before sending a signal to an echo chamber or EMT reverberation plate, it was common to delay the signal a few milliseconds by passing it through a tape delay machine. In true Abbey Road style, this setup had the acronym STEED for stereo echo, echo delay (or something similar). Similarly, ADT was for years the accepted shorthand for artificial (or automatic) double tracking.
Tuesday, 27 June 2017
5 Production Secrets Of The Beatles
Widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential bands in the history of popular music, there is plenty of available literature on the techniques and equipment used to record The Fab Four, including my personal favorite Recording The Beatles by Brian Kehew and Kevin Ryan.
Here are some examples of creative production techniques used by the group and the talented crew of engineers that helped create a catalog of albums that have sold well over two billion copies:
1. Recording at half-speed on In My Life”
On this song from 1965 Album Rubber Soul, all but the instrumental bridge section had been completed. John Lennon asked Producer George Martin to come up with something baroque sounding.”¹
Martin's Bach-inspired Piano solo was written at a tempo that Martin himself couldn't play. The engineers brilliantly recorded the part with the tape running at half-speed, so when it was played back at normal speed, the solo was an octave higher and twice as fast. Additionally, the timbre was altered, with the attack of the notes played on the piano becoming more prominent.
There are numerous other examples of the engineers using this technique on Beatles recordings, including extensive use on Strawberry Fields Forever.”
Using the varispeed” mode in Pro Tools' elastic audio can perhaps yield similar results.
2. Reverse tape effect on the guitar solo of I'm Only Sleeping”
On this John Lennon tune from Revolver (1966) George Harrison spent a reported five hours meticulously constructing a guitar part by having the engineers run the tape backwards as he composed a solo that would ultimately, when reversed, fit the dreamlike mood.”²
The part was double-tracked, once with fuzz, and once without. Conveniently, you can hear the entire master reversed, revealing what the original guitar recording sounds like at Beatles Bible
Essentially every modern DAW has a reverse audio capability, but actually taking the time to write out the performance before the effect is applied will definitely result in something unique.
3. Randomly splicing tape loops together on Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!”
For this song, which derived virtually all of its lyrical content from a 19th century circus poster owned by John Lennon, a carnival atmosphere” was desired for the production.
In the middle-eight, we have perhaps one of the most creative techniques used on The Beatles recordings, with engineer Geoff Emerick (as instructed by George Martin) taking tape recordings of fairground organs and calliope music, chopping the tape with scissors, throwing the pieces up into the air, and reassembling at random.⁴
The resulting effect is quite unique, and fits in perfectly with the rest of the psychedelic Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
This type of effect (if desired) is not only much easier to do in a modern DAW, it is certainly cheaper than mangling sought-after analog tape.
4. Use of Tea Towels and other drum muffling techniques on multiple recordings
As early as 1962, Ringo can be seen using John's Harmonica to dampen his snare drum.
Throughout the years, it was quite common to use tea towels to muffle the sound of his drums. A collection of pictures and information on Ringo's kits and evolution can be seen at Ringo's Beatle Kits This became a sonic staple for the band.
Using tea towels or other muffling devices can allow for more control over the volume, attack and decay of individual drums. Especially considering it was common for the engineers to apply extreme compression on Ringo's kit with a Fairchild limiter, dampening the drums allowed for a tighter, more focused sound.
I highly suggest having Moongel dampening on hand, but don't be afraid to use something more aggressive. Native Instruments' Abbey Road 60's Drums even come with tea towel articulations, making it one of my go-to virtual instruments for vintage sounding drums.
Bonus: Practicing singing on Oh! Darling”
Performing a song until the performance sounds the way the artist wants it to — what a concept!
During the Abbey Road sessions Paul McCartney would come in early to the studio that this classic album shares a name with, arriving before the other band members, singing this retro-sounding song once per day attempting to capture the raw, strained quality that the production needed. Engineer Alan Parsons recalls:
Paul came in several days running to do the lead vocal on Oh! Darling. He'd come in, sing it and say, ‘No, that's not it, I'll try it again tomorrow.' He only tried it once per day, I suppose he wanted to capture a certain rawness which could only be done once before the voice changed. I remember him saying, ‘Five years ago I could have done this in a flash,' referring, I suppose, to the days of Long Tall Sally and Kansas City”⁴
There is not yet a plugin that can achieve this effect. This is just one of the countless examples of McCartney's complete (and sometimes obsessive) dedication to capturing a musical moment exactly as he envisioned it.
Conclusion
I've always quite enjoyed researching the production secrets of my absolute favorite band. Fortunately, there's a wealth of knowledge available on recordings, in books, and on various Internet sources.
Additionally, much credit to Waves, Softube, and Native Instruments whose lines of Abbey Road-inspired plugins and VSTs help preserve the sounds of this crucial time in recorded music for current engineers.
Here are some examples of creative production techniques used by the group and the talented crew of engineers that helped create a catalog of albums that have sold well over two billion copies:
1. Recording at half-speed on In My Life”
On this song from 1965 Album Rubber Soul, all but the instrumental bridge section had been completed. John Lennon asked Producer George Martin to come up with something baroque sounding.”¹
Martin's Bach-inspired Piano solo was written at a tempo that Martin himself couldn't play. The engineers brilliantly recorded the part with the tape running at half-speed, so when it was played back at normal speed, the solo was an octave higher and twice as fast. Additionally, the timbre was altered, with the attack of the notes played on the piano becoming more prominent.
There are numerous other examples of the engineers using this technique on Beatles recordings, including extensive use on Strawberry Fields Forever.”
Using the varispeed” mode in Pro Tools' elastic audio can perhaps yield similar results.
2. Reverse tape effect on the guitar solo of I'm Only Sleeping”
On this John Lennon tune from Revolver (1966) George Harrison spent a reported five hours meticulously constructing a guitar part by having the engineers run the tape backwards as he composed a solo that would ultimately, when reversed, fit the dreamlike mood.”²
The part was double-tracked, once with fuzz, and once without. Conveniently, you can hear the entire master reversed, revealing what the original guitar recording sounds like at Beatles Bible
Essentially every modern DAW has a reverse audio capability, but actually taking the time to write out the performance before the effect is applied will definitely result in something unique.
3. Randomly splicing tape loops together on Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!”
For this song, which derived virtually all of its lyrical content from a 19th century circus poster owned by John Lennon, a carnival atmosphere” was desired for the production.
In the middle-eight, we have perhaps one of the most creative techniques used on The Beatles recordings, with engineer Geoff Emerick (as instructed by George Martin) taking tape recordings of fairground organs and calliope music, chopping the tape with scissors, throwing the pieces up into the air, and reassembling at random.⁴
The resulting effect is quite unique, and fits in perfectly with the rest of the psychedelic Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
This type of effect (if desired) is not only much easier to do in a modern DAW, it is certainly cheaper than mangling sought-after analog tape.
4. Use of Tea Towels and other drum muffling techniques on multiple recordings
As early as 1962, Ringo can be seen using John's Harmonica to dampen his snare drum.
Throughout the years, it was quite common to use tea towels to muffle the sound of his drums. A collection of pictures and information on Ringo's kits and evolution can be seen at Ringo's Beatle Kits This became a sonic staple for the band.
Using tea towels or other muffling devices can allow for more control over the volume, attack and decay of individual drums. Especially considering it was common for the engineers to apply extreme compression on Ringo's kit with a Fairchild limiter, dampening the drums allowed for a tighter, more focused sound.
I highly suggest having Moongel dampening on hand, but don't be afraid to use something more aggressive. Native Instruments' Abbey Road 60's Drums even come with tea towel articulations, making it one of my go-to virtual instruments for vintage sounding drums.
Bonus: Practicing singing on Oh! Darling”
Performing a song until the performance sounds the way the artist wants it to — what a concept!
During the Abbey Road sessions Paul McCartney would come in early to the studio that this classic album shares a name with, arriving before the other band members, singing this retro-sounding song once per day attempting to capture the raw, strained quality that the production needed. Engineer Alan Parsons recalls:
Paul came in several days running to do the lead vocal on Oh! Darling. He'd come in, sing it and say, ‘No, that's not it, I'll try it again tomorrow.' He only tried it once per day, I suppose he wanted to capture a certain rawness which could only be done once before the voice changed. I remember him saying, ‘Five years ago I could have done this in a flash,' referring, I suppose, to the days of Long Tall Sally and Kansas City”⁴
There is not yet a plugin that can achieve this effect. This is just one of the countless examples of McCartney's complete (and sometimes obsessive) dedication to capturing a musical moment exactly as he envisioned it.
Conclusion
I've always quite enjoyed researching the production secrets of my absolute favorite band. Fortunately, there's a wealth of knowledge available on recordings, in books, and on various Internet sources.
Additionally, much credit to Waves, Softube, and Native Instruments whose lines of Abbey Road-inspired plugins and VSTs help preserve the sounds of this crucial time in recorded music for current engineers.
Tuesday, 20 June 2017
60s Style Recording Techniques
When you think about those sixties and seventies recordings, nobody used any kind of boutique microphone preamps back then. We used the microphone preamps that were in the consoles. There really weren't many manufacturers of consoles back then. Consoles by the major record labels were frequently custom-made.
The early console manufacturers which started up in the middle late sixties were API, Electrodyne, Quad 8, Sphere, Neve, Helios, Norelco/Philips, Auditronics, MCI, Neumann, to name a few, a very few. So you really never complained back then about sonic integrity, blah blah, etc.. We were more concerned with what brand of analog tape and how you tweaked your machines.
Monitor speakers were frequently Altec 604E's or, JBL 4310's. Compressors and limiters were frequently Universal Audio optical LA2 tube or LA3 transistor, FET 1176LN, RCA, CBS, Fairchild and were optical devices or variable "mu" tubes, predecessor to the VCA (voltage controlled amplifier).
Microphone selection was also fairly limited back then. Dominated by Neumann U47/67/87 and a host of others along with the RCA 44 & 77 series of ribbon microphones. And becoming popular was a line of dynamic microphones by Shure. The unidyne series proceeded the well-known SM57 but were very similar.
Much of that sound was a LESS IS MORE approach. We didn't have nothin' in comparison to what we have today. So what you are hearing is pretty much good experience, technique and knowledge, since we were all using pretty much the same stuff.
When it came to Chambers, if you worked for a really good place like Capitol, your chamber was probably specially manufactured rooms or stairwells. If you were poor, you had a spring reverb. If you were rich, you had an EMT plate. If you were really creative, you could use a tape machine for all sorts of effects, like echoes, delays, phasing/flanging. You could also take a beefy power amplifier, connect that to a sinewave oscillator and voilà ! Variable speed generator for your tape recorder.
And tape saturation was a big part of the character of the sound. Learning how to bang the meters just the right way, drums took on a different character. You could do most anything if you had 4 to 8 tracks to work with!
So emulating that sound of a late sixties to early and mid-seventies recording can still be easily accomplished. Yes, the sound of the microphone preamps was a big factor in the sound. None of those older consoles had limited headroom like most of the inexpensive mixers have today. So to try and emulate that older sound means, you need plenty of headroom in your console/preamps. You can get that sound by running your microphone gain trims lower than normal, while pushing up your faders for proper record levels. This will give you improved headroom but will sacrifice some of the signal to noise ratio but since we are probably talking rock and roll here, it won't be much of a factor. That additional headroom will give you that higher-quality, expensive console sound with that punchy quality without maxing out your mike preamps.
George Martin thought I was a worthwhile engineer but I declined his offer as a maintenance Tech.
Ms. Stoopid Remy
Theres a very very common thread here to your list of artists you're seeking to emulate the recordings of............That being the songs themselves. And the arrangements.
The recording approach was simplified because of the LACK of gear available. Lack of tracks meant you HAD to make decisions about the structure of the material....what sections to mix down to open some tracks up for more creativity.
Its the very thing that is lacking today in mainstream music. Its so overproduced and homoginized that it lacks depth and heart.
The early console manufacturers which started up in the middle late sixties were API, Electrodyne, Quad 8, Sphere, Neve, Helios, Norelco/Philips, Auditronics, MCI, Neumann, to name a few, a very few. So you really never complained back then about sonic integrity, blah blah, etc.. We were more concerned with what brand of analog tape and how you tweaked your machines.
Monitor speakers were frequently Altec 604E's or, JBL 4310's. Compressors and limiters were frequently Universal Audio optical LA2 tube or LA3 transistor, FET 1176LN, RCA, CBS, Fairchild and were optical devices or variable "mu" tubes, predecessor to the VCA (voltage controlled amplifier).
Microphone selection was also fairly limited back then. Dominated by Neumann U47/67/87 and a host of others along with the RCA 44 & 77 series of ribbon microphones. And becoming popular was a line of dynamic microphones by Shure. The unidyne series proceeded the well-known SM57 but were very similar.
Much of that sound was a LESS IS MORE approach. We didn't have nothin' in comparison to what we have today. So what you are hearing is pretty much good experience, technique and knowledge, since we were all using pretty much the same stuff.
When it came to Chambers, if you worked for a really good place like Capitol, your chamber was probably specially manufactured rooms or stairwells. If you were poor, you had a spring reverb. If you were rich, you had an EMT plate. If you were really creative, you could use a tape machine for all sorts of effects, like echoes, delays, phasing/flanging. You could also take a beefy power amplifier, connect that to a sinewave oscillator and voilà ! Variable speed generator for your tape recorder.
And tape saturation was a big part of the character of the sound. Learning how to bang the meters just the right way, drums took on a different character. You could do most anything if you had 4 to 8 tracks to work with!
So emulating that sound of a late sixties to early and mid-seventies recording can still be easily accomplished. Yes, the sound of the microphone preamps was a big factor in the sound. None of those older consoles had limited headroom like most of the inexpensive mixers have today. So to try and emulate that older sound means, you need plenty of headroom in your console/preamps. You can get that sound by running your microphone gain trims lower than normal, while pushing up your faders for proper record levels. This will give you improved headroom but will sacrifice some of the signal to noise ratio but since we are probably talking rock and roll here, it won't be much of a factor. That additional headroom will give you that higher-quality, expensive console sound with that punchy quality without maxing out your mike preamps.
George Martin thought I was a worthwhile engineer but I declined his offer as a maintenance Tech.
Ms. Stoopid Remy
Theres a very very common thread here to your list of artists you're seeking to emulate the recordings of............That being the songs themselves. And the arrangements.
The recording approach was simplified because of the LACK of gear available. Lack of tracks meant you HAD to make decisions about the structure of the material....what sections to mix down to open some tracks up for more creativity.
Its the very thing that is lacking today in mainstream music. Its so overproduced and homoginized that it lacks depth and heart.
Friday, 16 June 2017
Recording, Editing And Mixing
Here are some tips and suggestions for recording, editing and mixing vocals, from the perspective of a producer/engineer.
Although my focus is rock music, some of the following suggestions should be useful for other types of music but which may require different approaches.
In almost all articles about any type of audio recording, you'll hear there are no rules — whatever sounds good, is good.” The same is true for recording vocals; experimentation is important, and as each song and singer require a different technique, trying out ideas is even more important.
I do believe that there is still one rule though: a great performance trumps perfect pitch and timing, and also is far more important than the vocal sound itself. I'd rather hear a vocal that is totally believable and involves me in the meaning and emotion of the song than a vocal edited into technical brilliance with cool effects and perfect sonics, but is stiff, uninvolving and robotic.
The Recording Space
Where and how you set up your recording area for vocals will have as much, if not more, effect than your choice of equipment. Make sure that the microphone is not in the center of the room; this is where standing waves will be most prominent. The best position is usually about a third along the longest dimension, but roughly equidistant from the side walls.
Use acoustic baffles and sound absorbing materials to create a good space within your recording room. Remember that you want to have sound absorption behind the singer, and also (although not as important if you're using a cardiod patterned mic) behind the mic. Pick an area of your room that is well away from reflective surfaces.
If you're recording at home, a good, inexpensive, way to create free-standing acoustic screens is to construct a frame using 1″ PVC piping, usually used for garden sprinklers. This stuff is available from any big box hardware store, and is very cheap and easy to work with. Buy several lengths of piping, some T-joints to make stands, some 90 degree bend pieces and glue. Sketch out your plans, measure accurately and make them sufficiently tall - 7′ is usually a good height, and you really only care about the top 4′. Once you've double-checked your measurements, start cutting the pipes. Assemble the entire frame ‘dry' first to make sure that all your pieces work together, and once you have made sure that your measurements are accurate, start gluing. Now use these frames as hangers for quilts, duvets, blankets or sleeping bags thrown over the top. If you're more ambitious, use furniture movers' packing blankets which are also very cheap. You should easily be able to construct several complete screens for less than $25 each.
If you want to get even more ambitious, construct wood frames and Owens Corning 703 semi-rigid panels, covered with an open weave fabric such as burlap. A box of six 48″ x 24″ x 2″ panels can be found for around $70. You can get fancy by making one side of the screen absorbent, and use peg board on the other side to be more reflective.
Microphone Technique and Position
Good singers will move their position relative to the microphone depending on the changing vocals levels during the song. Too much movement, and varying room reflections will change the sound, resulting in a less consistent, and potentially more remote sound. However, even experienced singers forget mic position when they get caught up in the emotion of the performance. Part of the producer/engineer's job is to make the singer relaxed and comfortable, and able to concentrate on the performance. Nagging singers about anything is usually a bad idea, and can be annoying. Mention microphone position a couple of times, but be supportive and gentle. With some more inexperienced singers, it can help to make a mark on the floor with tape, and suggest to the singer that that's their mark. This doesn't help much with singers who ‘lean' into the mic, but it's a start.
Arrange the mic position so that the singer sings up” into the mic capsule. 2 to 4 inches above the mouth should work fine; the idea is that the singer should raise their chin an inch or two. Start off with the singer's mouth about 5″ - 6″ from the microphone (maybe a little closer with a dynamic mic). Every singer will be different, so a few passes checking out the level changes between loud and soft passages in the song will be needed. Remember that with most cardioid mics, the closer the singer is to the mic, more bass will be accentuated because of the proximity effect.
Always use a good pop shield between the singer and the microphone to prevent ‘b' and p' plosives. Although DIY stocking constructions can work ok, a decent pop shield is not expensive and worth having. Metal mesh shields are best, with fabric mesh a close second. Don't use foam wind covers: they're ineffective for pop suppression and attenuate higher frequencies. Position the shield so that it's about 3″-4″ from the mic — this also should be changed if the singer tends to get too close to the mic for quieter passages — use the position of the shield to make the singer keep his/her distance from the mic.
With some voices and microphones, sibilance can be a problem. Sibilance is the bright ‘hissing' noise made by consonants such as s,” t” c” and f.” To reduce sibilance with directional mics is to rotate it off-axis by a few degrees. This position reduces the high-frequency sensitivity of most mics a touch, and can help reduce problem sibilance. Around 15 degrees is enough. An off-axis placement also has the advantage of reducing popping. It is always better to spend time getting the vocals sounding good, with minimal pops and sibilance rather than try editing or de-essers later.
If you're recording a singer with a naturally ‘boxy' sound, or perhaps a singer with an obviously nasal tone, an omni or figure-8 patterned mic can help, although you may need to position the singer a little closer to the mic so that the direct sound of the voice is more prominent than the room effect.
For singers with wildly fluctuating levels, try using two mics, one more sensitive than other. Space them a few inches apart, angled in slightly, and have the vocalist sing into the space between the mics. Or use a similar mic (if available) and switch in the -10 or -20 dB pad on one of them. Record on separate tracks, and switch them at the editing/mixing stage later if needed.
Most mics and preamps have a bass roll-off filter, often at a set turnover frequency between 80 - 150 Hz. Use the most appropriate setting for the vocal, but use it.
A common question is Why do I see vocal mics positioned upside down?” Actually, there are two reasons: the first dates back 60+ years: one of the most used and famous microphones for vocals (along with the AKG C12) is the Neumann U47 tube mic, introduced just after WWII. This mic had the M7 PVC capsule, which had a tendency to dry out over time, and this deterioration was accelerated by heat. So it made sense to hang U47s upside down, as heat rises, so eliminating cooking the capsule over time. Another reason is that it's easier to get singers to sing ‘up' a little; singers are less likely to mess with a vocal mic height when it's suspended on a boom upside down than a mic on a stand right in front of them.
Once the mics were mounted upside down, another advantage became obvious; there was a benefit for the singer by getting the mic, stand, boom and cables out of the way, offering the singer a better view of a music stand for holding lyrics, hanging headphones and storing other items.
Scheduling
There used to be a tradition of leaving vocals to the end of recording projects, after most overdubs and extra sweetening had been completed. Not a great idea: singers can't be expected to sit around for days or weeks, and then pump out all their vocals in two or three days.
The number of hours you can expect to record vocals is limited, especially with heavier rock and metal. So it makes sense to scheduled vocal recording over as many days as possible, breaking up sessions into styles so that more melodic, less stressful, vocals are recorded first which serve as a warm up to attempt more aggressive parts. Depending on the length of your sessions, include a few days off too, particularly after a sessions where the singer's voice has been really stressed.
Some singers prefer to attempt capturing a continuous performance in longer takes, punching in corrective phrases or parts. If you're recording rock vocals with dynamics ranging from a whisper to a roar, try the dual microphone suggestion I mentioned above.
Microphone Choice
Experienced singers who have recorded often may know which microphones have worked well for them in the past. Ask, if you know that the singer has this depth of experience.
If your singer doesn't have a great deal of experience, then start by choosing a microphone with an inverse character to the singer's natural sound.
Every voice is different, and therefore there is no ‘perfect' vocal microphone. Most advice on recording vocals starts by telling you to use a large diaphragm condenser (LDC) microphone. Although often true, ‘often' isn't the same as ‘always.' If you have a singer (particularly female singers) with a thin, high, hard vocal sound, better results can be achieved using a dynamic microphone, or even a ribbon. An Electrovoice RE20 can be a great vocal mic, as can the Shure SM7B, and the lowly SM58 can sound great, paired with a good preamp.
Cheap LDC microphones often have a noticeable harshness at higher frequencies and therefore are exactly the wrong choice for this type of singer. The market is crowded with sub $1,000 LDC microphones, many of which have this unnatural harshness, although I tried an inexpensive Audix CX212 recently that was rather good. Among the many other reasonably priced, but premium, LDC microphone brands, Lauten Audio and Peluso are worth checking out.
Another variable is the material itself: having found the perfect mic for the first song, perhaps a rock song with wide dynamics and a belted-out chorus, don't assume that this should be the mic used throughout all vocal sessions. An appropriate choice for an intimate ballad may require a different microphone. Usually, two different mics will cover the range of vocal delivery. Some mics don't work as well with high vocal levels, as the timbre of vocal character changes with delivery.
Buying Microphones
If you're primarily recording just one singer, don't base your purchasing decision on reviews. Try out different microphones, and pick one that best suits your singer. Microphones are tricky to buy — online stores often won't accept microphone returns unless they have a defect. Visit a good pro audio dealer with a demo room and try out several mics. Or book an hour or two at a local studio with a decent mic cabinet, and try out their options, but use the same preamp with each test, so that you're comparing apples to apples.
If you're planning to record different, unknown singers, start with at least a good dynamic mic, and a large diaphragm condenser.
If you have a limited budget, spend money on a preamp first. A good preamp can make a basic mic sound good, but a crappy preamp can make a great mic sound far less impressive.
You can add to your mic collection as your budget expands, but it makes no sense to replace poor quality preamps.
Headphone Mix
The headphone mix that the singer hears is critical to achieve a great performance. A touch of reverb is often helpful as it creates a sense of space around the vocal, but ask the singer what they prefer.
The balance between the backing track and the vocal can influence the performance:
If the vocal is too loud in the headphones = flat notes — lower energy.
If the vocal is too soft in the headphones = sharp notes and a strained performance
If a singer is mostly flat, turn up the backing track in their phones a little without telling them. If the singer is mostly sharp, then turn the backing track down. This will help correct consistent, but small, pitch problems. If the singer is inconsistent; sometimes sharp, sometimes flat, then you have to do more work in helping the singer create the right performance. Remember though, the performance is the most important element: slight pitch issues are less important than a convincing, emotionally believable performance.
Take the time to set up your monitor mix so that you can easily adjust the mix so that you can immediately offer the singer changes to help; drums a bit louder to help timing issues, more keys or guitars to help with pitch, less bass or lead licks to help with focus , etc. Keep the headphone mix as simple as possible, and usually it's a good idea to pull out most of the sweetening and any parts which could be distracting, such as percussion with off rhythms.
Headphone choice is another consideration, and if your singer prefers ‘one ear off' that will lead you to a different mix. Closed back headphones are needed.
Recording Chain
Try to capture the character and performance of the vocal going to the computer (or tape) and forget about trying to create it in the mix. Editing and mixing vocal tracks should be the final touches to enhance an already good vocal track.
Audio interfaces contain preamps. Most of them are just OK, but are usually bland and can easily be bettered by a good, separate preamp.
For rock songs, I always use hardware compressors as part of recording chain because this type of material often needs more dynamic control before the signal gets to the analog-to-digital converters. For different types of music, you may decide that a compressor isn't needed. Unlike the days when we recorded to tape and wanted to get the best signal-to-noise ratio, and therefore wanted to record hefty levels to tape, modern digital recording has such a huge dynamic range when recording 24-bit that this isn't strictly necessary. However, I still choose to use hardware compression, but now not as much for dynamic control but rather because I like the coloration of the sound that different compressors impart. A compressed vocal in the headphones also benefits the singer; they feel less need to compensate dynamically.
Aim for 5-6 dB of gain reduction on the signal peaks, but don't overdo compression during recording—you can't remove it later. Start with a ‘not too fast' attack time, so the transients pass relatively unscathed, with medium release time. You'll need to experiment with your particular recording chain, singer and style of song.
One disadvantage of project studio recording is that there is less attention paid to the recording levels before the converters. I like riding a vocal fader during the recording, but to do this you'll need some type of outboard mixer. It then becomes simple to push/pull the vocal levels during the recording which results in a smoother recording, and less work to do at the editing/mixer stage. There are many small mixers available at reasonable cost, some of which have the audio interface and converters built-in, so that they connect to your DAW machine via FireWire or USB. If you're recording just with a DAW, be sure to set up your cue (foldback) monitoring sends so that they are sent pre-fade, so your adjustments to levels don't alter the headphone mix.
Encouragement and Criticism
The psychology of how to get the best performance out of a singer is much more important than microphone choice, preamps, compression or anything else to do with the technical aspects of recording. It's all about getting a singer to relax, and feel confident enough to give their very best performance, without feeling self-conscious. I have been a guest on many sessions where I cringed—not because of the recorded sound, but how thoughtless comments destroyed the mood of the session, and made the singer uncomfortable and doubt their performance. I have actually seen an engineer jump on to the talkback button and bark flat, do it again” at the first delivery of an iffy note. Moments later on another pass, this same idiot impatiently interrupted again by saying wrong again!” If it were my session, I would have fired the moron.
Be mindful that the singer is trying their hardest. Encouragement with gentle criticism pays dividends. Try to avoid comments where you're making comments containing don't.” Use positive reinforcement. Take frequent short breaks, offering the singer a chance to relax and listen back to their progress. Trying to record take after take can be confusing; it's hard for a singer to hear which parts of their performance need adjustment, so breaks, when a singer can review the takes so far, can help enormously.
Most singers prefer a relaxed environment, and don't want to feel that they are in a fishbowl. Turn down the lights, and get people out of the control room. Singers don't want the distraction of seeing band members appearing to be cracking jokes, having conversations, mixing cocktails or anything else unrelated to the vocal performance. Hearing a babble of background conversation each time the talkback button is pressed is another distraction.
Record everything. There's no such thing as a ‘practice' pass, particularly with DAW recording (multiple vocal tracking to tape can get more challenging). Often the best performance is achieved in early takes so make sure you've recorded them. Set up your DAW so each pass is automatically recorded to a new track.
Make Notes
Make notes of settings used in your hardware recording chain. Microphones settings such as LF cut and pad settings, preamp settings, compressor settings , etc. All will be very useful if you decide at a later stage to record or replace additional vocal parts. Also make these notes for any hardware you use at the mixing stage.
Editing and Mixing Vocals
For the purposes of this discussion, let's talk about a very simple scenario: assume that your goal is to have two separate tracks of vocals: one for the verses, and one for the choruses.
The verses are fairly constrained, but the choruses involve a much more aggressive vocal performance, where the singer's voice character (timbre) changes and the levels and vocal sound change considerably.
Comping Vocals
Once the recording stage is completed, you'll probably have multiple audio tracks of your vocals. You now will want to comp (to compile or to create a composite vocal track) vocal takes into the best comp'd track(s). You may want to keep sections of the vocals on separate tracks so that you can more easily apply processing and effects later, reducing the amount of automation and dynamic control needed, and corrective processes such as EQ which may not be needed on the entire completed vocal track. Remember that the comp should result in seamless vocal parts which do not sound disjointed. Often the individual phrases may not sound quite right when soloed, as you are auditioning out of context. Just remember to focus more on the continuity of the performance and not on all the details at this stage — we'll tackle the fine detail later.
Every DAW will have features for comping tracks, and they all work slightly differently but the result is the same; a new track is created, and parts from your vocal takes are placed on this new track, comping the best parts of all your takes. The unused parts are removed from the arrangement, but filed away in case they are needed later. See the section below though, as some out takes can be very useful for simulating double tracked vocals.
Destructive Editing
Once you have your comp'd vocal tracks, you may have residual problems to deal with. There may be noises, pops, mouth noises, breath sounds and unwanted level fluctuation between phrases.
There are two schools of thought here; some people always use automation for everything; others (like me) prefer to rely less on automation, but rather permanently editing the audio file. For me, it's easier to scoot through a file, selecting parts in a wave form editor, and eliminating noises, adding silence between phrases, reducing some breath sounds, interpolating pops and other minor fixes, and changing gain of entire phrases, than to make small adjustments manually by graphically changing automation. To me, it's just good housekeeping to have a smooth vocal track where I can use any additional compression mostly for sonic reasons rather than depending on automation and compression for too broad dynamic control.
Some dislike destructive editing as you really can't change your mind later (other than reverting to a backed up original file) but I actually like this supposed restriction; I like making decisions as early in the recording process as possible, only leaving minor instrumental parts open to tailor later, probably because I came from the old school analogue recording days using tape, when we had to make such choices as there was much less flexibility than in the present day digital domain, and when bouncing tracks down to create a comp'd track on a tape machine was commonplace, in order to free up more tracks for record additional parts. No going back in those days!
De-Essers
De-essing isn't much of a concern for me, as I believe that recording the vocal using the right microphone, position and hardware chain prevents the problem before it becomes an issue. However, if you record many different singers, or mix material where you had no control during the recording process, then think about investing in a used dbx 902 - the best de-esser made, hardware or software. They can be found quite inexpensively. You'll need a dbx 900 series rack to house the module, but they are not expensive, and gives you somewhere to house additional 900 series units such as the excellent 903 compressor (essentially a dbx 160 in a 900 module) ; also quite cheap and a great workhorse as a single channel compressor/limiter.
EQ
Hopefully, you have already record your vocals with a LF cut setting on the microphone set at 75 or 80 kHz, or an equivalent setting on your preamp. But your work on the low end of the spectrum probably isn't done. Listen to your vocal track in context, and see how much you can roll off at the low end. Don't do this with the track soloed: you'll think that the vocal is sounding too thin. But in with the mix, you'll be surprised how much low end you can remove. This will help make the vocal sit right in the mix, and is one step in cleaning up the low end, a common problem in mixes that have too little low end definition. This concept also applies to many other instruments — get rid of frequencies that aren't the focal point of that instrument's sound and stop too many instruments competing in the same frequency band.
Taking this idea one step further, try to cut frequencies rather than boosting them. Boominess is most apparent around 200-250 Hz. Instead of boosting mid range frequencies to attempt to make the vocal more present, try notching EQ around 230 Hz with a higher Q setting (every voice will be different) and then boost the vocal level.
Many vocals have their most obvious frequencies in the range from about 750 Hz to 2.8 kHz. Unfortunately, guitars are in the same range and turning up the vocal will just make the vocals sit on top of the guitars, not mixed in with guitars. A better approach is to EQ the guitar so that the guitar sound is scooped out where it's clashing with the vocals, using as narrow a ‘notch' as possible, the result being that the vocals now have their own space alongside the guitars but only in the competing range.
Another technique to try is compressing the guitars more when the vocal is present, using side-chain compression to affect the guitars. In my example above, use a send from the vocal track, heavily EQ's, so that the vocal being sent to the compressors side chain has a very limited frequency range, centered on the vocal's fundamental frequency. It won't sound good, but that doesn't matter as you're not hearing this vocal; its sole purpose is to control the compression of the guitars only for that frequency range.
If you're looking for a new tool for mixing, dynamic EQ is a very useful plug-in, combining an EQ and compressor with features enabling you to apply EQ only when the signal within a certain frequency range exceeds a certain loudness, as set by your threshold and filter. A good example of this is the Brainworx dynEQ
Compression
A compressor isn't intelligent, so it doesn't know when vocal dynamics are being changed for an intentional effect or because the singer wasn't adequately controlling the dynamics of their performance, or even didn't care and got caught up in the emotional delivery of their take. Often you want vocal dynamics. Your job is to ride the vocal levels (or automate) to preserve the dynamics you want, while smoothing out those which you don't.
A compressor can make a vocal ride properly within a dense mix and it is an indispensable tool to control peaks and bring average levels up. Compressors work much faster than you can, but for slow averaging of vocal dynamics, you will do a better, and smarter, job.
Don't ask your compressor to work too hard.
The more you do, the more obvious the artifacts will be, and depending on your compressor settings, you will make the compression noticeable, which is often not desirable. If, after you have tried the recording and editing tips described above, you still find that your vocal levels are not adequately controlled, try routing the output of your vocal track to a aux, and ride the vocal level to the aux, using automation to capture your moves. Now add final compression and other effects you want to the aux, not to the original vocal track.
Serial compression:
I use this technique all the time, and I think it's the most commonly overlooked technique regarding compression. Using two compressors can be very helpful, as you're making the two compressors to perform different tasks. Try using a fast FET-type compressor (such as an 1176 or software emulation) set to a fast attack, with the threshold (or input control in the case of an 1176) set so that only the peak signals are being compressed leaving the body of the vocal untouched. Aim for a gain reduction that sounds natural but firmly controls the peaks.
Now follow this with opto type compressor (an LA-2 or LA-3 type) with a slower attack and release, but this time set the threshold lower with more moderate ratio. This will level the vocal track nicely, and the two compressors together will give you a much smoother result.
Parallel Compression:
Often used on other instruments, particularly drums and guitars, a modified version of parallel compression can work great on vocals. Either duplicate those vocal parts you want to use this effect on, or send from the original vocal track to an aux channel. On the aux channel (or separate vocal FX track), add a great deal of EQ to boost presence and air, roll off the low end, and add obscene amount of compression. You now have two vocal tracks, one natural and one with heavy EQ and compression. Now set the natural vocal channel to it's appropriate mix level and bring up the FX vocal so it just peaks out under the unaffected vocal to add presence and excitement. Use the natural vocal channel for the send to reverb you might want. Set right, the vocal won't get lost in the mix, and although the unaffected vocal sounds natural there will be a presence and edge that can be a real benefit to your vocal mix.
See here for more details on compression and compressor types.
Vocal Tracking, ADT, Doubling, Thickening etc.
ADT (Artificial Double Tracking): Since the dawn of time (well, since The Beatles) double-tracking vocals is one of the most useful and commonly used effects. Double-tracked vocals are stacking the same vocal twice (sometimes more) to thicken the vocal sound. This can also work very well on backing vocals.
The best results will be obtained by doing it for real, getting the singer(s) to duplicate their part on another track. However, it's a laborious process. Getting the two vocals to be tight enough can be quite difficult, particularly if the original is more of a creative interpretation than a technically consistent performance. Where words start or end on hard consonant sounds, such T” or C,” the doubling result can sound sloppy. Some singers are really good at it, others are not. Either way, it can be a time-consuming and demanding process.
You'd think that it would be easy to recreate the ADT effect easily using modern technology. Just adding a digital delay to the vocal at the same level as the original part, with a delay time of 40-100 ms and no feedback should do it, right? Not really.
When ADT was first created at Abbey Road, the technique involved two tape machines; one playing back the original vocal to another tape machine, which then recorded and played back the delayed vocal in to another channel on the mixing console, the delay time being changed by use of vari-speed control on the second tape machine. Because tape was being used, with two machines, variations were being introduced several times along the process. Tape machines have wow, flutter and scrape flutter, each of which introduces slight changes to the delayed vocal. Add to this the addition of harmonic distortion introduced by the delayed vocal being passed through three stages of signal electronics, and the characteristics of tape itself, all of which introduces undefinable ‘analog warmth' and the end result is just not the same as slapping on a digital delay.
However, its possible to get close enough for all but the most critical ears. There are various plug-ins which claim to simulate this quite well, but they are mostly expensive. I've had some success by using VacuumSound's ADT plug-in coupled with a distortion/warmth unit like a Culture Vulture Alternative plug-ins such as PSP's Vintage Warmer can help too.
Additional, a fast compressor taming the peaks to soften hard consonants, or even an envelope shaper, can make the tracked vocal sit better with the original. Melodyne's offset by random pitch and time is another additional process worth trying.
Dual Shifter:
Another favorite. Older Eventide hardware like the h3000 had a dual shifter setting. This can be recreated by standard plug-ins. First, copy your vocal track twice. On copy 1, insert a compressor (opto type) with a low ratio and the threshold set so that the compressor is working on all but the quietest parts. Follow this with a pitch shifter, pitching the vocal down by 10 - 15 cents. Now add a digital delay, initially set to something like 10 - 50 ms. On copy 2, insert a fast FET or VCA type compressor with a fast attack, higher ratio, with the threshold set so that it's only working on the peaks. Add a pitch shifter again, this time pitching up 10 - 15 cents. Once again, add a digital delay, but this time set to a different delay than copy 1. Route the outputs of these two copies to a submix, panned L - R, where you can apply further compression if needed, together with EQ further removing low-end mud, and perhaps adding a little presence. Tweak these suggested ‘starting point' settings to taste.
Whisper track:
Here's a tip for an effect which may be useful on slow, more intimate verses, especially ballads. Ask your singer to whisper, almost talking, along with the vocal track, often in a lower register, compress it, and bring this up so it's barely audible under the lead vocal.
Reamping:
Usually used for guitars and keyboard tracks, this can be very useful for really hard edged, tough vocals in hard rock or metal mixes. It can add lots of distortion and a great live sound to a vocal. Send your vocal track out to a recording room via a reamp box, or at a pinch, a passive DI box in reverse. Use this send as an input to a guitar amp, and close mic it. Also, add a room mic and compress it. Record these two new tracks, and mix them to taste under your lead vocal. As there's really nothing useful coming out of a guitar amp above about 4.5 kHz, you'll find that mixed right, it can add a lot of edge and aggression into your vocals.
Reverb
Washy vocal reverb has become less fashionable in recent years, compared to pop/rock music production of the classics from the 70's and 80's. But there are many exceptions. The current trend is to use reverb to create a little space around the vocal, but not much that it's an obviously applied reverb effect.
Unlike recording orchestral music or recordings of ensembles in folk, jazz or MOR, I find that the use of convolution reverbs are less useful in pop/rock/metal genres. Convolution reverbs use a ‘fingerprint' of an actual space and mix it (or convolve) your vocal with that space, creating the impression that your singer's vocal was recorded in that space.
The downside of using convolution reverbs is that the IRs (the Impulse Response files used to convolve with the vocal) are less flexible and offer fewer options to create a suitable reverb sound. So I often prefer to use digital reverb units which use algorithms to create synthetic effects. These are purely mathematical calculations where every part of the reverb effect is freely adjustable and you can tailor exactly the vocal reverb you want. Lexicon is the best known and most used manufacturer of all digital algorithm-based reverbs since the 70's.
For a lead vocal, I'd suggest starting with a short reverb time (well under 2 secs), and a pre-delay around 40 - 60 ms and boost the early refections part of the parameters depending on the reverb device you're using. It's not possible to give hard-and-fast recommendations; you'll need to experiment. I've always been a lover of the EMT 140 fbST plate for vocals (the real one!) but some digital reverbs (the original 224XL Rich Plate that carried through the Lexicon PCM series) are all very good.
In software emulations, the UAD Plate 140 is good, and the recently introduced Lexicon Native plug-ins are superb. Unlike many software emulations of hardware, reverb plug-ins work extremely well, as in reality the hardware digital reverbs are really just giant calculators, with little or no significant analogue component coloration, so their algorithms can be calculated just as well with modern computers, although the CPU requirements can be considerable; a good reason to have one or more hardware units if your budget permits.
The usual method of using reverb is to insert your reverb on an aux (containing either routing to external hardware or your reverb plug-in) and send to it from your vocal(s) tracks.
Increase your return levels until you can just hear the effect, and then back off a touch. As mentioned earlier, this is merely a starting point; adjust the pre-delay, and reverb time to fit your mix, and don't worry too much about the finer digital delay parameters. You will probably need to EQ the send to your reverb, and often the return, by removing anything under at least 100 Hz and treat other areas of your reverb to removing any annoying resonances and notch out any unwanted frequency bands.
Try altering the reverb time between the different sections of your song. In rock music, start by making it shorter for verses and longer for the choruses. Generally you'll have verses and chorus parts on different tracks, so you can use multiple reverb unit instances if you're using plug-ins, as reverb plug-ins in particular are challenging to automate when altering certain parameters such as reverb times. If you're using hardware, but only one unit, you'll have to record the effect returns for parts using differing hardware settings.
Background Vocals
There are many techniques for recording, editing and mixing background vocals ().
Start by applying the same editing and mixing techniques as suggested earlier for lead vocals. Your first task is to clean up the individual vocal parts. Most often, you're looking to create a blended, smooth sound for these vocals.
Here's an approach I like using:
Panning:
Keep your out of the way of your lead vocal, which is almost always panned dead center. Start by panning them at 10 'clock and 2 'clock. I prefer to leave the extreme hard left, hard right positions for any effects returns. Having said that, I have found occasionally that panning the backing vocals hard left-right can work, returning effects to your mix with a narrower stereo spread.
Low End EQ:
Just as we removed low end from the lead vocals, you should do the same here. But this time, while listening to your in context, move your low cut turnover frequency up until your start to noticeably thin out. Then back off a touch. Soloed, these vocals will sound way too thin, but will work fine in the mix. It's important to make sure your don't muddy-up low end guitar and keyboard parts, as well as clouding the space used by your bass parts.
Compression:
By now you should have applied broad level control manually to your parts. Next step is to beat them unmercifully into a blend, where individual transients and untamed peaks are ruthlessly stamped on. Perhaps this is one area of mixing where you can forget subtlety; squash those vocal peaks! Fast attack, high ratio is the order of the day, with the threshold set so that peaks are heavily controlled.
Submix:
Route the outputs of all your tracks to a stereo bus, maintaining pan position, and with the correct mix of your parts. This single fader aux will control your overall level. Leave it alone for now. You'll probably need to make multiple passes throughout your mix, automating the balance between the various parts. Usually, I do this by grabbing automated faders in ‘touch' mode and will go in to the individual tracks afterwards, smoothing out automation points and correcting any mistakes.
Once you have all your individual levels set, the next step is to apply some ‘glue' to further smooth out and blend your Start by inserting a stereo bus compressor (hardware or software) on your aux, and set it (as a starting point) with a low ratio (2:1 or less as a start), not too fast attack, low-ish threshold, medium release and aim for gain reduction in the 3-4 dB range, adjusting the threshold until this is achieved. Continue playing through the song, adjusting the release value until it's smooth and seamless.
Almost there!
Now you want to apply some EQ, if necessary, to create a space for the lead vocal if the parts occur at the same time as the lead vocal. If they only occur occasionally, apply the side-chain compression or dynamic EQ techniques as described earlier, but using the lead vocal as the control signal. If the overlap the lead vocals often, then apply the EQ scooping technique described above so that the EQ is notched in the lead vocal's range — it won't take much to make quite a difference. In any event, you should use this additional processing only if you have trouble riding the levels in the mix.
Depending on your set up, you can send from the aux to another aux for reverb and other effects. On some , particularly on slower, more intimate material, a chorus effect can work well on mixed in to taste, as well as before the reverb send. I particularly like Fluid , from Audio Damage, although there are many on the market, and if you have access to Lexicon or Eventide hardware, they're unbeatable. ADT and dual shifter effects (see above) can also work well on , as well as many effects normally used for lead vocals. Again, experiment after you've cleaned up your basic tracks.
Vocal Balance
Vocals not sitting well in the mix is one of the commonest questions around the audio recording forums. Hopefully, some of the above suggestions will help, but as a final note, it's important to listen to your mix, as it evolves, on a variety of playback systems. Often, too loud or too quiet vocals will be easier to judge at very low playback levels, as well as playing your mixes back on small crappy speakers, simulating the environment in which your song is most likely to be played. Also try playing back your mix and stand outside the mix room, and play back your mix on other devices, including your car and all the iGadgets. Listen to commercial mixes of the same genre and see how your vocal balance and sound stand up.
Finally, when you commit to your mix, take the time to create additional, and clearly noted, alternative mixes with the lead vocal up a little on one, and down a little on another. A Little” depends on your particular song, but 1 or 2 dB should be plenty. When you get to the mastering stage, the additional, overall, mastering processing needed may affect your vocal balance and it can be a lifesaver to have alternative mixes available, identical other than the vocal level. Creating separations for mastering can be even more useful.
Although my focus is rock music, some of the following suggestions should be useful for other types of music but which may require different approaches.
In almost all articles about any type of audio recording, you'll hear there are no rules — whatever sounds good, is good.” The same is true for recording vocals; experimentation is important, and as each song and singer require a different technique, trying out ideas is even more important.
I do believe that there is still one rule though: a great performance trumps perfect pitch and timing, and also is far more important than the vocal sound itself. I'd rather hear a vocal that is totally believable and involves me in the meaning and emotion of the song than a vocal edited into technical brilliance with cool effects and perfect sonics, but is stiff, uninvolving and robotic.
The Recording Space
Where and how you set up your recording area for vocals will have as much, if not more, effect than your choice of equipment. Make sure that the microphone is not in the center of the room; this is where standing waves will be most prominent. The best position is usually about a third along the longest dimension, but roughly equidistant from the side walls.
Use acoustic baffles and sound absorbing materials to create a good space within your recording room. Remember that you want to have sound absorption behind the singer, and also (although not as important if you're using a cardiod patterned mic) behind the mic. Pick an area of your room that is well away from reflective surfaces.
If you're recording at home, a good, inexpensive, way to create free-standing acoustic screens is to construct a frame using 1″ PVC piping, usually used for garden sprinklers. This stuff is available from any big box hardware store, and is very cheap and easy to work with. Buy several lengths of piping, some T-joints to make stands, some 90 degree bend pieces and glue. Sketch out your plans, measure accurately and make them sufficiently tall - 7′ is usually a good height, and you really only care about the top 4′. Once you've double-checked your measurements, start cutting the pipes. Assemble the entire frame ‘dry' first to make sure that all your pieces work together, and once you have made sure that your measurements are accurate, start gluing. Now use these frames as hangers for quilts, duvets, blankets or sleeping bags thrown over the top. If you're more ambitious, use furniture movers' packing blankets which are also very cheap. You should easily be able to construct several complete screens for less than $25 each.
If you want to get even more ambitious, construct wood frames and Owens Corning 703 semi-rigid panels, covered with an open weave fabric such as burlap. A box of six 48″ x 24″ x 2″ panels can be found for around $70. You can get fancy by making one side of the screen absorbent, and use peg board on the other side to be more reflective.
Microphone Technique and Position
Good singers will move their position relative to the microphone depending on the changing vocals levels during the song. Too much movement, and varying room reflections will change the sound, resulting in a less consistent, and potentially more remote sound. However, even experienced singers forget mic position when they get caught up in the emotion of the performance. Part of the producer/engineer's job is to make the singer relaxed and comfortable, and able to concentrate on the performance. Nagging singers about anything is usually a bad idea, and can be annoying. Mention microphone position a couple of times, but be supportive and gentle. With some more inexperienced singers, it can help to make a mark on the floor with tape, and suggest to the singer that that's their mark. This doesn't help much with singers who ‘lean' into the mic, but it's a start.
Arrange the mic position so that the singer sings up” into the mic capsule. 2 to 4 inches above the mouth should work fine; the idea is that the singer should raise their chin an inch or two. Start off with the singer's mouth about 5″ - 6″ from the microphone (maybe a little closer with a dynamic mic). Every singer will be different, so a few passes checking out the level changes between loud and soft passages in the song will be needed. Remember that with most cardioid mics, the closer the singer is to the mic, more bass will be accentuated because of the proximity effect.
Always use a good pop shield between the singer and the microphone to prevent ‘b' and p' plosives. Although DIY stocking constructions can work ok, a decent pop shield is not expensive and worth having. Metal mesh shields are best, with fabric mesh a close second. Don't use foam wind covers: they're ineffective for pop suppression and attenuate higher frequencies. Position the shield so that it's about 3″-4″ from the mic — this also should be changed if the singer tends to get too close to the mic for quieter passages — use the position of the shield to make the singer keep his/her distance from the mic.
With some voices and microphones, sibilance can be a problem. Sibilance is the bright ‘hissing' noise made by consonants such as s,” t” c” and f.” To reduce sibilance with directional mics is to rotate it off-axis by a few degrees. This position reduces the high-frequency sensitivity of most mics a touch, and can help reduce problem sibilance. Around 15 degrees is enough. An off-axis placement also has the advantage of reducing popping. It is always better to spend time getting the vocals sounding good, with minimal pops and sibilance rather than try editing or de-essers later.
If you're recording a singer with a naturally ‘boxy' sound, or perhaps a singer with an obviously nasal tone, an omni or figure-8 patterned mic can help, although you may need to position the singer a little closer to the mic so that the direct sound of the voice is more prominent than the room effect.
For singers with wildly fluctuating levels, try using two mics, one more sensitive than other. Space them a few inches apart, angled in slightly, and have the vocalist sing into the space between the mics. Or use a similar mic (if available) and switch in the -10 or -20 dB pad on one of them. Record on separate tracks, and switch them at the editing/mixing stage later if needed.
Most mics and preamps have a bass roll-off filter, often at a set turnover frequency between 80 - 150 Hz. Use the most appropriate setting for the vocal, but use it.
A common question is Why do I see vocal mics positioned upside down?” Actually, there are two reasons: the first dates back 60+ years: one of the most used and famous microphones for vocals (along with the AKG C12) is the Neumann U47 tube mic, introduced just after WWII. This mic had the M7 PVC capsule, which had a tendency to dry out over time, and this deterioration was accelerated by heat. So it made sense to hang U47s upside down, as heat rises, so eliminating cooking the capsule over time. Another reason is that it's easier to get singers to sing ‘up' a little; singers are less likely to mess with a vocal mic height when it's suspended on a boom upside down than a mic on a stand right in front of them.
Once the mics were mounted upside down, another advantage became obvious; there was a benefit for the singer by getting the mic, stand, boom and cables out of the way, offering the singer a better view of a music stand for holding lyrics, hanging headphones and storing other items.
Scheduling
There used to be a tradition of leaving vocals to the end of recording projects, after most overdubs and extra sweetening had been completed. Not a great idea: singers can't be expected to sit around for days or weeks, and then pump out all their vocals in two or three days.
The number of hours you can expect to record vocals is limited, especially with heavier rock and metal. So it makes sense to scheduled vocal recording over as many days as possible, breaking up sessions into styles so that more melodic, less stressful, vocals are recorded first which serve as a warm up to attempt more aggressive parts. Depending on the length of your sessions, include a few days off too, particularly after a sessions where the singer's voice has been really stressed.
Some singers prefer to attempt capturing a continuous performance in longer takes, punching in corrective phrases or parts. If you're recording rock vocals with dynamics ranging from a whisper to a roar, try the dual microphone suggestion I mentioned above.
Microphone Choice
Experienced singers who have recorded often may know which microphones have worked well for them in the past. Ask, if you know that the singer has this depth of experience.
If your singer doesn't have a great deal of experience, then start by choosing a microphone with an inverse character to the singer's natural sound.
Every voice is different, and therefore there is no ‘perfect' vocal microphone. Most advice on recording vocals starts by telling you to use a large diaphragm condenser (LDC) microphone. Although often true, ‘often' isn't the same as ‘always.' If you have a singer (particularly female singers) with a thin, high, hard vocal sound, better results can be achieved using a dynamic microphone, or even a ribbon. An Electrovoice RE20 can be a great vocal mic, as can the Shure SM7B, and the lowly SM58 can sound great, paired with a good preamp.
Cheap LDC microphones often have a noticeable harshness at higher frequencies and therefore are exactly the wrong choice for this type of singer. The market is crowded with sub $1,000 LDC microphones, many of which have this unnatural harshness, although I tried an inexpensive Audix CX212 recently that was rather good. Among the many other reasonably priced, but premium, LDC microphone brands, Lauten Audio and Peluso are worth checking out.
Another variable is the material itself: having found the perfect mic for the first song, perhaps a rock song with wide dynamics and a belted-out chorus, don't assume that this should be the mic used throughout all vocal sessions. An appropriate choice for an intimate ballad may require a different microphone. Usually, two different mics will cover the range of vocal delivery. Some mics don't work as well with high vocal levels, as the timbre of vocal character changes with delivery.
Buying Microphones
If you're primarily recording just one singer, don't base your purchasing decision on reviews. Try out different microphones, and pick one that best suits your singer. Microphones are tricky to buy — online stores often won't accept microphone returns unless they have a defect. Visit a good pro audio dealer with a demo room and try out several mics. Or book an hour or two at a local studio with a decent mic cabinet, and try out their options, but use the same preamp with each test, so that you're comparing apples to apples.
If you're planning to record different, unknown singers, start with at least a good dynamic mic, and a large diaphragm condenser.
If you have a limited budget, spend money on a preamp first. A good preamp can make a basic mic sound good, but a crappy preamp can make a great mic sound far less impressive.
You can add to your mic collection as your budget expands, but it makes no sense to replace poor quality preamps.
Headphone Mix
The headphone mix that the singer hears is critical to achieve a great performance. A touch of reverb is often helpful as it creates a sense of space around the vocal, but ask the singer what they prefer.
The balance between the backing track and the vocal can influence the performance:
If the vocal is too loud in the headphones = flat notes — lower energy.
If the vocal is too soft in the headphones = sharp notes and a strained performance
If a singer is mostly flat, turn up the backing track in their phones a little without telling them. If the singer is mostly sharp, then turn the backing track down. This will help correct consistent, but small, pitch problems. If the singer is inconsistent; sometimes sharp, sometimes flat, then you have to do more work in helping the singer create the right performance. Remember though, the performance is the most important element: slight pitch issues are less important than a convincing, emotionally believable performance.
Take the time to set up your monitor mix so that you can easily adjust the mix so that you can immediately offer the singer changes to help; drums a bit louder to help timing issues, more keys or guitars to help with pitch, less bass or lead licks to help with focus , etc. Keep the headphone mix as simple as possible, and usually it's a good idea to pull out most of the sweetening and any parts which could be distracting, such as percussion with off rhythms.
Headphone choice is another consideration, and if your singer prefers ‘one ear off' that will lead you to a different mix. Closed back headphones are needed.
Recording Chain
Try to capture the character and performance of the vocal going to the computer (or tape) and forget about trying to create it in the mix. Editing and mixing vocal tracks should be the final touches to enhance an already good vocal track.
Audio interfaces contain preamps. Most of them are just OK, but are usually bland and can easily be bettered by a good, separate preamp.
For rock songs, I always use hardware compressors as part of recording chain because this type of material often needs more dynamic control before the signal gets to the analog-to-digital converters. For different types of music, you may decide that a compressor isn't needed. Unlike the days when we recorded to tape and wanted to get the best signal-to-noise ratio, and therefore wanted to record hefty levels to tape, modern digital recording has such a huge dynamic range when recording 24-bit that this isn't strictly necessary. However, I still choose to use hardware compression, but now not as much for dynamic control but rather because I like the coloration of the sound that different compressors impart. A compressed vocal in the headphones also benefits the singer; they feel less need to compensate dynamically.
Aim for 5-6 dB of gain reduction on the signal peaks, but don't overdo compression during recording—you can't remove it later. Start with a ‘not too fast' attack time, so the transients pass relatively unscathed, with medium release time. You'll need to experiment with your particular recording chain, singer and style of song.
One disadvantage of project studio recording is that there is less attention paid to the recording levels before the converters. I like riding a vocal fader during the recording, but to do this you'll need some type of outboard mixer. It then becomes simple to push/pull the vocal levels during the recording which results in a smoother recording, and less work to do at the editing/mixer stage. There are many small mixers available at reasonable cost, some of which have the audio interface and converters built-in, so that they connect to your DAW machine via FireWire or USB. If you're recording just with a DAW, be sure to set up your cue (foldback) monitoring sends so that they are sent pre-fade, so your adjustments to levels don't alter the headphone mix.
Encouragement and Criticism
The psychology of how to get the best performance out of a singer is much more important than microphone choice, preamps, compression or anything else to do with the technical aspects of recording. It's all about getting a singer to relax, and feel confident enough to give their very best performance, without feeling self-conscious. I have been a guest on many sessions where I cringed—not because of the recorded sound, but how thoughtless comments destroyed the mood of the session, and made the singer uncomfortable and doubt their performance. I have actually seen an engineer jump on to the talkback button and bark flat, do it again” at the first delivery of an iffy note. Moments later on another pass, this same idiot impatiently interrupted again by saying wrong again!” If it were my session, I would have fired the moron.
Be mindful that the singer is trying their hardest. Encouragement with gentle criticism pays dividends. Try to avoid comments where you're making comments containing don't.” Use positive reinforcement. Take frequent short breaks, offering the singer a chance to relax and listen back to their progress. Trying to record take after take can be confusing; it's hard for a singer to hear which parts of their performance need adjustment, so breaks, when a singer can review the takes so far, can help enormously.
Most singers prefer a relaxed environment, and don't want to feel that they are in a fishbowl. Turn down the lights, and get people out of the control room. Singers don't want the distraction of seeing band members appearing to be cracking jokes, having conversations, mixing cocktails or anything else unrelated to the vocal performance. Hearing a babble of background conversation each time the talkback button is pressed is another distraction.
Record everything. There's no such thing as a ‘practice' pass, particularly with DAW recording (multiple vocal tracking to tape can get more challenging). Often the best performance is achieved in early takes so make sure you've recorded them. Set up your DAW so each pass is automatically recorded to a new track.
Make Notes
Make notes of settings used in your hardware recording chain. Microphones settings such as LF cut and pad settings, preamp settings, compressor settings , etc. All will be very useful if you decide at a later stage to record or replace additional vocal parts. Also make these notes for any hardware you use at the mixing stage.
Editing and Mixing Vocals
For the purposes of this discussion, let's talk about a very simple scenario: assume that your goal is to have two separate tracks of vocals: one for the verses, and one for the choruses.
The verses are fairly constrained, but the choruses involve a much more aggressive vocal performance, where the singer's voice character (timbre) changes and the levels and vocal sound change considerably.
Comping Vocals
Once the recording stage is completed, you'll probably have multiple audio tracks of your vocals. You now will want to comp (to compile or to create a composite vocal track) vocal takes into the best comp'd track(s). You may want to keep sections of the vocals on separate tracks so that you can more easily apply processing and effects later, reducing the amount of automation and dynamic control needed, and corrective processes such as EQ which may not be needed on the entire completed vocal track. Remember that the comp should result in seamless vocal parts which do not sound disjointed. Often the individual phrases may not sound quite right when soloed, as you are auditioning out of context. Just remember to focus more on the continuity of the performance and not on all the details at this stage — we'll tackle the fine detail later.
Every DAW will have features for comping tracks, and they all work slightly differently but the result is the same; a new track is created, and parts from your vocal takes are placed on this new track, comping the best parts of all your takes. The unused parts are removed from the arrangement, but filed away in case they are needed later. See the section below though, as some out takes can be very useful for simulating double tracked vocals.
Destructive Editing
Once you have your comp'd vocal tracks, you may have residual problems to deal with. There may be noises, pops, mouth noises, breath sounds and unwanted level fluctuation between phrases.
There are two schools of thought here; some people always use automation for everything; others (like me) prefer to rely less on automation, but rather permanently editing the audio file. For me, it's easier to scoot through a file, selecting parts in a wave form editor, and eliminating noises, adding silence between phrases, reducing some breath sounds, interpolating pops and other minor fixes, and changing gain of entire phrases, than to make small adjustments manually by graphically changing automation. To me, it's just good housekeeping to have a smooth vocal track where I can use any additional compression mostly for sonic reasons rather than depending on automation and compression for too broad dynamic control.
Some dislike destructive editing as you really can't change your mind later (other than reverting to a backed up original file) but I actually like this supposed restriction; I like making decisions as early in the recording process as possible, only leaving minor instrumental parts open to tailor later, probably because I came from the old school analogue recording days using tape, when we had to make such choices as there was much less flexibility than in the present day digital domain, and when bouncing tracks down to create a comp'd track on a tape machine was commonplace, in order to free up more tracks for record additional parts. No going back in those days!
De-Essers
De-essing isn't much of a concern for me, as I believe that recording the vocal using the right microphone, position and hardware chain prevents the problem before it becomes an issue. However, if you record many different singers, or mix material where you had no control during the recording process, then think about investing in a used dbx 902 - the best de-esser made, hardware or software. They can be found quite inexpensively. You'll need a dbx 900 series rack to house the module, but they are not expensive, and gives you somewhere to house additional 900 series units such as the excellent 903 compressor (essentially a dbx 160 in a 900 module) ; also quite cheap and a great workhorse as a single channel compressor/limiter.
EQ
Hopefully, you have already record your vocals with a LF cut setting on the microphone set at 75 or 80 kHz, or an equivalent setting on your preamp. But your work on the low end of the spectrum probably isn't done. Listen to your vocal track in context, and see how much you can roll off at the low end. Don't do this with the track soloed: you'll think that the vocal is sounding too thin. But in with the mix, you'll be surprised how much low end you can remove. This will help make the vocal sit right in the mix, and is one step in cleaning up the low end, a common problem in mixes that have too little low end definition. This concept also applies to many other instruments — get rid of frequencies that aren't the focal point of that instrument's sound and stop too many instruments competing in the same frequency band.
Taking this idea one step further, try to cut frequencies rather than boosting them. Boominess is most apparent around 200-250 Hz. Instead of boosting mid range frequencies to attempt to make the vocal more present, try notching EQ around 230 Hz with a higher Q setting (every voice will be different) and then boost the vocal level.
Many vocals have their most obvious frequencies in the range from about 750 Hz to 2.8 kHz. Unfortunately, guitars are in the same range and turning up the vocal will just make the vocals sit on top of the guitars, not mixed in with guitars. A better approach is to EQ the guitar so that the guitar sound is scooped out where it's clashing with the vocals, using as narrow a ‘notch' as possible, the result being that the vocals now have their own space alongside the guitars but only in the competing range.
Another technique to try is compressing the guitars more when the vocal is present, using side-chain compression to affect the guitars. In my example above, use a send from the vocal track, heavily EQ's, so that the vocal being sent to the compressors side chain has a very limited frequency range, centered on the vocal's fundamental frequency. It won't sound good, but that doesn't matter as you're not hearing this vocal; its sole purpose is to control the compression of the guitars only for that frequency range.
If you're looking for a new tool for mixing, dynamic EQ is a very useful plug-in, combining an EQ and compressor with features enabling you to apply EQ only when the signal within a certain frequency range exceeds a certain loudness, as set by your threshold and filter. A good example of this is the Brainworx dynEQ
Compression
A compressor isn't intelligent, so it doesn't know when vocal dynamics are being changed for an intentional effect or because the singer wasn't adequately controlling the dynamics of their performance, or even didn't care and got caught up in the emotional delivery of their take. Often you want vocal dynamics. Your job is to ride the vocal levels (or automate) to preserve the dynamics you want, while smoothing out those which you don't.
A compressor can make a vocal ride properly within a dense mix and it is an indispensable tool to control peaks and bring average levels up. Compressors work much faster than you can, but for slow averaging of vocal dynamics, you will do a better, and smarter, job.
Don't ask your compressor to work too hard.
The more you do, the more obvious the artifacts will be, and depending on your compressor settings, you will make the compression noticeable, which is often not desirable. If, after you have tried the recording and editing tips described above, you still find that your vocal levels are not adequately controlled, try routing the output of your vocal track to a aux, and ride the vocal level to the aux, using automation to capture your moves. Now add final compression and other effects you want to the aux, not to the original vocal track.
Serial compression:
I use this technique all the time, and I think it's the most commonly overlooked technique regarding compression. Using two compressors can be very helpful, as you're making the two compressors to perform different tasks. Try using a fast FET-type compressor (such as an 1176 or software emulation) set to a fast attack, with the threshold (or input control in the case of an 1176) set so that only the peak signals are being compressed leaving the body of the vocal untouched. Aim for a gain reduction that sounds natural but firmly controls the peaks.
Now follow this with opto type compressor (an LA-2 or LA-3 type) with a slower attack and release, but this time set the threshold lower with more moderate ratio. This will level the vocal track nicely, and the two compressors together will give you a much smoother result.
Parallel Compression:
Often used on other instruments, particularly drums and guitars, a modified version of parallel compression can work great on vocals. Either duplicate those vocal parts you want to use this effect on, or send from the original vocal track to an aux channel. On the aux channel (or separate vocal FX track), add a great deal of EQ to boost presence and air, roll off the low end, and add obscene amount of compression. You now have two vocal tracks, one natural and one with heavy EQ and compression. Now set the natural vocal channel to it's appropriate mix level and bring up the FX vocal so it just peaks out under the unaffected vocal to add presence and excitement. Use the natural vocal channel for the send to reverb you might want. Set right, the vocal won't get lost in the mix, and although the unaffected vocal sounds natural there will be a presence and edge that can be a real benefit to your vocal mix.
See here for more details on compression and compressor types.
Vocal Tracking, ADT, Doubling, Thickening etc.
ADT (Artificial Double Tracking): Since the dawn of time (well, since The Beatles) double-tracking vocals is one of the most useful and commonly used effects. Double-tracked vocals are stacking the same vocal twice (sometimes more) to thicken the vocal sound. This can also work very well on backing vocals.
The best results will be obtained by doing it for real, getting the singer(s) to duplicate their part on another track. However, it's a laborious process. Getting the two vocals to be tight enough can be quite difficult, particularly if the original is more of a creative interpretation than a technically consistent performance. Where words start or end on hard consonant sounds, such T” or C,” the doubling result can sound sloppy. Some singers are really good at it, others are not. Either way, it can be a time-consuming and demanding process.
You'd think that it would be easy to recreate the ADT effect easily using modern technology. Just adding a digital delay to the vocal at the same level as the original part, with a delay time of 40-100 ms and no feedback should do it, right? Not really.
When ADT was first created at Abbey Road, the technique involved two tape machines; one playing back the original vocal to another tape machine, which then recorded and played back the delayed vocal in to another channel on the mixing console, the delay time being changed by use of vari-speed control on the second tape machine. Because tape was being used, with two machines, variations were being introduced several times along the process. Tape machines have wow, flutter and scrape flutter, each of which introduces slight changes to the delayed vocal. Add to this the addition of harmonic distortion introduced by the delayed vocal being passed through three stages of signal electronics, and the characteristics of tape itself, all of which introduces undefinable ‘analog warmth' and the end result is just not the same as slapping on a digital delay.
However, its possible to get close enough for all but the most critical ears. There are various plug-ins which claim to simulate this quite well, but they are mostly expensive. I've had some success by using VacuumSound's ADT plug-in coupled with a distortion/warmth unit like a Culture Vulture Alternative plug-ins such as PSP's Vintage Warmer can help too.
Additional, a fast compressor taming the peaks to soften hard consonants, or even an envelope shaper, can make the tracked vocal sit better with the original. Melodyne's offset by random pitch and time is another additional process worth trying.
Dual Shifter:
Another favorite. Older Eventide hardware like the h3000 had a dual shifter setting. This can be recreated by standard plug-ins. First, copy your vocal track twice. On copy 1, insert a compressor (opto type) with a low ratio and the threshold set so that the compressor is working on all but the quietest parts. Follow this with a pitch shifter, pitching the vocal down by 10 - 15 cents. Now add a digital delay, initially set to something like 10 - 50 ms. On copy 2, insert a fast FET or VCA type compressor with a fast attack, higher ratio, with the threshold set so that it's only working on the peaks. Add a pitch shifter again, this time pitching up 10 - 15 cents. Once again, add a digital delay, but this time set to a different delay than copy 1. Route the outputs of these two copies to a submix, panned L - R, where you can apply further compression if needed, together with EQ further removing low-end mud, and perhaps adding a little presence. Tweak these suggested ‘starting point' settings to taste.
Whisper track:
Here's a tip for an effect which may be useful on slow, more intimate verses, especially ballads. Ask your singer to whisper, almost talking, along with the vocal track, often in a lower register, compress it, and bring this up so it's barely audible under the lead vocal.
Reamping:
Usually used for guitars and keyboard tracks, this can be very useful for really hard edged, tough vocals in hard rock or metal mixes. It can add lots of distortion and a great live sound to a vocal. Send your vocal track out to a recording room via a reamp box, or at a pinch, a passive DI box in reverse. Use this send as an input to a guitar amp, and close mic it. Also, add a room mic and compress it. Record these two new tracks, and mix them to taste under your lead vocal. As there's really nothing useful coming out of a guitar amp above about 4.5 kHz, you'll find that mixed right, it can add a lot of edge and aggression into your vocals.
Reverb
Washy vocal reverb has become less fashionable in recent years, compared to pop/rock music production of the classics from the 70's and 80's. But there are many exceptions. The current trend is to use reverb to create a little space around the vocal, but not much that it's an obviously applied reverb effect.
Unlike recording orchestral music or recordings of ensembles in folk, jazz or MOR, I find that the use of convolution reverbs are less useful in pop/rock/metal genres. Convolution reverbs use a ‘fingerprint' of an actual space and mix it (or convolve) your vocal with that space, creating the impression that your singer's vocal was recorded in that space.
The downside of using convolution reverbs is that the IRs (the Impulse Response files used to convolve with the vocal) are less flexible and offer fewer options to create a suitable reverb sound. So I often prefer to use digital reverb units which use algorithms to create synthetic effects. These are purely mathematical calculations where every part of the reverb effect is freely adjustable and you can tailor exactly the vocal reverb you want. Lexicon is the best known and most used manufacturer of all digital algorithm-based reverbs since the 70's.
For a lead vocal, I'd suggest starting with a short reverb time (well under 2 secs), and a pre-delay around 40 - 60 ms and boost the early refections part of the parameters depending on the reverb device you're using. It's not possible to give hard-and-fast recommendations; you'll need to experiment. I've always been a lover of the EMT 140 fbST plate for vocals (the real one!) but some digital reverbs (the original 224XL Rich Plate that carried through the Lexicon PCM series) are all very good.
In software emulations, the UAD Plate 140 is good, and the recently introduced Lexicon Native plug-ins are superb. Unlike many software emulations of hardware, reverb plug-ins work extremely well, as in reality the hardware digital reverbs are really just giant calculators, with little or no significant analogue component coloration, so their algorithms can be calculated just as well with modern computers, although the CPU requirements can be considerable; a good reason to have one or more hardware units if your budget permits.
The usual method of using reverb is to insert your reverb on an aux (containing either routing to external hardware or your reverb plug-in) and send to it from your vocal(s) tracks.
Increase your return levels until you can just hear the effect, and then back off a touch. As mentioned earlier, this is merely a starting point; adjust the pre-delay, and reverb time to fit your mix, and don't worry too much about the finer digital delay parameters. You will probably need to EQ the send to your reverb, and often the return, by removing anything under at least 100 Hz and treat other areas of your reverb to removing any annoying resonances and notch out any unwanted frequency bands.
Try altering the reverb time between the different sections of your song. In rock music, start by making it shorter for verses and longer for the choruses. Generally you'll have verses and chorus parts on different tracks, so you can use multiple reverb unit instances if you're using plug-ins, as reverb plug-ins in particular are challenging to automate when altering certain parameters such as reverb times. If you're using hardware, but only one unit, you'll have to record the effect returns for parts using differing hardware settings.
Background Vocals
There are many techniques for recording, editing and mixing background vocals ().
Start by applying the same editing and mixing techniques as suggested earlier for lead vocals. Your first task is to clean up the individual vocal parts. Most often, you're looking to create a blended, smooth sound for these vocals.
Here's an approach I like using:
Panning:
Keep your out of the way of your lead vocal, which is almost always panned dead center. Start by panning them at 10 'clock and 2 'clock. I prefer to leave the extreme hard left, hard right positions for any effects returns. Having said that, I have found occasionally that panning the backing vocals hard left-right can work, returning effects to your mix with a narrower stereo spread.
Low End EQ:
Just as we removed low end from the lead vocals, you should do the same here. But this time, while listening to your in context, move your low cut turnover frequency up until your start to noticeably thin out. Then back off a touch. Soloed, these vocals will sound way too thin, but will work fine in the mix. It's important to make sure your don't muddy-up low end guitar and keyboard parts, as well as clouding the space used by your bass parts.
Compression:
By now you should have applied broad level control manually to your parts. Next step is to beat them unmercifully into a blend, where individual transients and untamed peaks are ruthlessly stamped on. Perhaps this is one area of mixing where you can forget subtlety; squash those vocal peaks! Fast attack, high ratio is the order of the day, with the threshold set so that peaks are heavily controlled.
Submix:
Route the outputs of all your tracks to a stereo bus, maintaining pan position, and with the correct mix of your parts. This single fader aux will control your overall level. Leave it alone for now. You'll probably need to make multiple passes throughout your mix, automating the balance between the various parts. Usually, I do this by grabbing automated faders in ‘touch' mode and will go in to the individual tracks afterwards, smoothing out automation points and correcting any mistakes.
Once you have all your individual levels set, the next step is to apply some ‘glue' to further smooth out and blend your Start by inserting a stereo bus compressor (hardware or software) on your aux, and set it (as a starting point) with a low ratio (2:1 or less as a start), not too fast attack, low-ish threshold, medium release and aim for gain reduction in the 3-4 dB range, adjusting the threshold until this is achieved. Continue playing through the song, adjusting the release value until it's smooth and seamless.
Almost there!
Now you want to apply some EQ, if necessary, to create a space for the lead vocal if the parts occur at the same time as the lead vocal. If they only occur occasionally, apply the side-chain compression or dynamic EQ techniques as described earlier, but using the lead vocal as the control signal. If the overlap the lead vocals often, then apply the EQ scooping technique described above so that the EQ is notched in the lead vocal's range — it won't take much to make quite a difference. In any event, you should use this additional processing only if you have trouble riding the levels in the mix.
Depending on your set up, you can send from the aux to another aux for reverb and other effects. On some , particularly on slower, more intimate material, a chorus effect can work well on mixed in to taste, as well as before the reverb send. I particularly like Fluid , from Audio Damage, although there are many on the market, and if you have access to Lexicon or Eventide hardware, they're unbeatable. ADT and dual shifter effects (see above) can also work well on , as well as many effects normally used for lead vocals. Again, experiment after you've cleaned up your basic tracks.
Vocal Balance
Vocals not sitting well in the mix is one of the commonest questions around the audio recording forums. Hopefully, some of the above suggestions will help, but as a final note, it's important to listen to your mix, as it evolves, on a variety of playback systems. Often, too loud or too quiet vocals will be easier to judge at very low playback levels, as well as playing your mixes back on small crappy speakers, simulating the environment in which your song is most likely to be played. Also try playing back your mix and stand outside the mix room, and play back your mix on other devices, including your car and all the iGadgets. Listen to commercial mixes of the same genre and see how your vocal balance and sound stand up.
Finally, when you commit to your mix, take the time to create additional, and clearly noted, alternative mixes with the lead vocal up a little on one, and down a little on another. A Little” depends on your particular song, but 1 or 2 dB should be plenty. When you get to the mastering stage, the additional, overall, mastering processing needed may affect your vocal balance and it can be a lifesaver to have alternative mixes available, identical other than the vocal level. Creating separations for mastering can be even more useful.
Sunday, 11 June 2017
Panning Techniques For Mixing. Are Asymmetrical Mixes Weird
When mixing a song there are an infinite number of ways to put together the stereo field or the left to right image across the speakers. When I am working with mixing clients, or training others to do mixing, one of the topics that often comes up is the idea of symmetry or left-right balance. If there is a guitar panned to one side, is there another guitar on the other side of the mix so it does not feel lopsided? This always leads to the question of whether or not left-right balance is something important that we should strive for. Won't it sound weird if we have something on one side without something to balance it on the other side?”
The answer to this is not as straightforward as it might seem. If we look at mixes from some of the great mixers, we will find that many do have almost perfect balance between the left and right side in terms of both arrangement as well as spectral balance. What I mean by spectral balance” is that they seem to have an equal amount of each frequency range on the left and right side of the mix. Check out this Green Day mix as a near perfect example of this. Except for the fact that the hi-hat is panned to the left side, the general sound of the left and right side are virtually identical.
But as we start to listen to a wider range of mixes we will also find the complete opposite. Check out this mix for U2 in which most of the song has a single guitar hard panned to the left side with absolutely nothing to balance it” on the right side.
In the last few decades the norm has been to pan the bass, kick drum, snare and main vocals straight up the middle, but what happens with the other elements is all over the map. We can find examples of very balanced symmetrical mixes as well as completely lopsided mixes. What can we take away from this?
You may have a strong feeling that mixes should have a strong left-right balance, but music fans do not care at all!
It is all just a matter of mood and personal preference. I tend to do both fairly often. Sometimes it is just letting the muse dictate where things should go, but often if I am making a mix asymmetrical it is because I want a particular instrument to stand out or have more presence in a mix. When a guitar (or any other instrument) sits alone on one side of a mix without a complimentary” instrument on the other side it will generally have more personality and connect with the listener in a more direct way. Instruments with left-right counterparts will tend to blend in as part of the ensemble. Another positive aspect of this is that when a primary instrument is set off to one side without an opposite counterpart, it will often compete less with the main vocal in the middle. While one is not better than the other, it is pretty obvious that both are completely valid.
One of the great tools we have available to us in mixing is to experiment with panning and see how it affects the overall feel of the mix, and even experiment with muting parts that have multiple versions of the same instrument/part to feature the part more. Regardless of what you do, the important thing is to mix in a way that you feel is best for the music because music lovers do not really care about anything else.
Here are a few more examples of some great lopsided mixes.
The entirety of Van Halen I
One fairly common mixing technique you will find is a trick where the mix will be fairly balanced in one section and then completely asymmetrical in another. This helps build a sense of dynamics even in very compressed recordings. Check out this John Mayer tune as an example.
Here is Lenny Kravitz doing the same thing
There are some days I actually miss the 70's and 80's not as often as one might imagine and some part of that nostalgia is in panning.
I can tell in a matter of seconds what decade a song was recorded in because as it happens my truck is missing the left side of the stereo mix and the difference between the decades is so very obvious. Starting somewhere in the mid 80's stereo mono” became the norm. Don't even need a left/right channel mix. One speaker pretty much gets it all. But then a Beatles tune comes on. Wow! If your readers haven't tried it—Listen to Abbey Road with one side turned off. A real eye opener.
And I love listening to Eddie Van Halen's rhythm playing on the first album. All the leads are on one side. Of course, you're stuck with David's vocals but the songs aren't all that long.
The answer to this is not as straightforward as it might seem. If we look at mixes from some of the great mixers, we will find that many do have almost perfect balance between the left and right side in terms of both arrangement as well as spectral balance. What I mean by spectral balance” is that they seem to have an equal amount of each frequency range on the left and right side of the mix. Check out this Green Day mix as a near perfect example of this. Except for the fact that the hi-hat is panned to the left side, the general sound of the left and right side are virtually identical.
But as we start to listen to a wider range of mixes we will also find the complete opposite. Check out this mix for U2 in which most of the song has a single guitar hard panned to the left side with absolutely nothing to balance it” on the right side.
In the last few decades the norm has been to pan the bass, kick drum, snare and main vocals straight up the middle, but what happens with the other elements is all over the map. We can find examples of very balanced symmetrical mixes as well as completely lopsided mixes. What can we take away from this?
You may have a strong feeling that mixes should have a strong left-right balance, but music fans do not care at all!
It is all just a matter of mood and personal preference. I tend to do both fairly often. Sometimes it is just letting the muse dictate where things should go, but often if I am making a mix asymmetrical it is because I want a particular instrument to stand out or have more presence in a mix. When a guitar (or any other instrument) sits alone on one side of a mix without a complimentary” instrument on the other side it will generally have more personality and connect with the listener in a more direct way. Instruments with left-right counterparts will tend to blend in as part of the ensemble. Another positive aspect of this is that when a primary instrument is set off to one side without an opposite counterpart, it will often compete less with the main vocal in the middle. While one is not better than the other, it is pretty obvious that both are completely valid.
One of the great tools we have available to us in mixing is to experiment with panning and see how it affects the overall feel of the mix, and even experiment with muting parts that have multiple versions of the same instrument/part to feature the part more. Regardless of what you do, the important thing is to mix in a way that you feel is best for the music because music lovers do not really care about anything else.
Here are a few more examples of some great lopsided mixes.
The entirety of Van Halen I
One fairly common mixing technique you will find is a trick where the mix will be fairly balanced in one section and then completely asymmetrical in another. This helps build a sense of dynamics even in very compressed recordings. Check out this John Mayer tune as an example.
Here is Lenny Kravitz doing the same thing
There are some days I actually miss the 70's and 80's not as often as one might imagine and some part of that nostalgia is in panning.
I can tell in a matter of seconds what decade a song was recorded in because as it happens my truck is missing the left side of the stereo mix and the difference between the decades is so very obvious. Starting somewhere in the mid 80's stereo mono” became the norm. Don't even need a left/right channel mix. One speaker pretty much gets it all. But then a Beatles tune comes on. Wow! If your readers haven't tried it—Listen to Abbey Road with one side turned off. A real eye opener.
And I love listening to Eddie Van Halen's rhythm playing on the first album. All the leads are on one side. Of course, you're stuck with David's vocals but the songs aren't all that long.
Thursday, 1 June 2017
British Recording Iconoclast Joe Meek Heard A New World
On February 3, 1967, Joe Meek inexplicably murdered his landlady with a shotgun and then turned the weapon on himself, thus ending a career that led from promising beginnings to international fame and,finally, to oblivion. Along the way, Meek had a powerful effect on the British recording industry, fundamentally changing the way records were made.
In the mid-'50s, British recording engineers were, in fact, engineers, to the point that they wore white lab coats. Producers, on the other hand, wore suits. Engineers executed standard procedures that were developed to record sounds with the greatest possible fidelity, whereas producers, who were charged with making the creative decisions, rarely understood recording technology. Equally important, both classes of professionals were employees of large studios and record companies. Truly independent engineers and producers were unheard of at the time.
Meek changed all that. In the process, he provoked an industry-wide backlash that is difficult to understand from a modern perspective because most of his innovations have been so thoroughly absorbed into common practice that they are hardly noticeable. Besides breaking nearly all the prevailing audio-engineering rules, he demonstrated that an individual could engineer and produce million-selling records in a home studio. Although Meek's gear seems downright primitive now, his studio techniques can be put to use in today's personal studios.
LONDON CALLING
Robert George Joe” Meek, born on April 5, 1929, was a precocious child. By the time he was ten, he had written, cast, and produced theatrical performances by and for the children in his village, and he had built a crystal radio set, a microphone, and a single-tube amplifier. At age 14, he upgraded his rig and worked dances and parties as a mobile DJ; at 16, he acted as musical supervisor and provided sound effects for local theater groups. In the summer of 1953, he built a disk cutter that he used to cut his first record, a sound-effects library.
Meek began his professional recording career in 1955, working as an engineer for IBC, the largest and most advanced studio in London. From 1955 to 1957, he engineered dozens of hit recordings for major British stars, often adding sonic touches that distinguished them from other pop recordings of the time. He tweaked the tape recorders to get more level on tape, placed mics close to sources rather than at thecorrect” distance, and used compressors and limiters for creative rather than corrective purposes. Perhaps worst of all, Meek sometimes intentionally distorted preamplifier inputs!
Many producers resented what they perceived as Meek's challenges to their authority, but his recordings had a funny way of becoming major hits; at the end of the day, that's what mattered to the artists and the record companies. Because so many of Meek's recordings became hits,some producers, including jazz and world-fusion pioneer Denis Preston, refused to work with anyone else.
But Meek was not happy working within the confines of IBC. The studio manager and many members of the staff resented Meek's attitude— as well as his tendency to throw fits when he didn't get his way — and they treated him badly. Much of that can be ascribed to professional jealousy, but it was no doubt exacerbated by the fact that Meek was homosexual. Of course, that didn't keep the rotten pigs,” as Meek called them, from trying to steal his secrets.”
It had three heads, took reels as wide as 8.25 inches, and ran at 15 and 7.5ips.
(John Repsch)
BEEN THERE, DONE THAT
While working at IBC and Lansdowne, Meek set a number of precedents in the English recording studio. Besides being the first to put microphones close to (and sometimes inside) sound sources, Meek experimented extensively with microphone selection, which gave him a broader palette of sounds.
He also worked with reflective surfaces. For example, he had trumpet sections play against a cement wall to record early reflections at IBC,and he sometimes used large movable Lucite panels to liven up the sound of a dead room at Lansdowne. Other reflective surfaces useful to Meek included those inside the echo chambers in both studios (see the sidebar Delay, Reverb, and Echo”).
Meek was the first engineer in the United Kingdom to use compressors to create pumping and breathing effects rather than merely to control dynamic range. He also pushed limiters to the max to get the hottest possible levels on tape and took advantage of analog tape's natural compression characteristics. It is also likely that Meek was one of the first engineers to direct inject the electric bass by plugging it straight in to the mixer.
In addition, Meek began experimenting while at IBC with sound-on-sound recording using two recorders. According to veteran engineer and producer Adrian Kerridge, who worked with Meek at the time, He and producer Michael Barclay used to work what they called composites, which they made track by track by track. What they were in effect doing was multitrack recording using the composite method. Nobody else to my knowledge in London, in fact, in Europe— I don't know about America — was working this way at that time.”
Kerridge also reports that while at Lansdowne from 1958 through1959, Meek used two tape recorders to produce flanging, an effect usually considered to have been developed in the mid-'60s. It was very successful,” Kerridge adds, and we used it a lot, together with expansion, compression, and limiting.”
OUTSIDE THE BOX
Changing the way individual sound sources were recorded was only one aspect of Meek's vision. Ultimately, he revamped the entire recording process and arrived at entirely new ways of working. For example,British pop recordings made in the mid- to late '50s had a lot ofroom” sound. Microphones were placed away from sound sources, and separation was achieved by keeping the musicians apart from each other. Meek close-miked sources, largely eliminating the room sound, and then used compressor/limiters to tighten up the sounds and give them more punch. Whatever ambience was lost because of the close-miking technique was made up for by sending everything to an echo chamber. That basic concept, though so common now that it's taken for granted, was considered radical (and wrong) at the time.
Trad-jazz trumpeter Humphrey Lyttleton's Bad Penny Blues” is one of the best-known examples of the way Meek's approach changed the character of recordings for the better. The song was built around a rolling boogie-woogie piano bass line and pushed along by a snare drum played with brushes. Meek compressed the dynamic range of all the instruments far beyond what was usual for jazz recordings, but he also made the brushes prominent and intentionally distorted the piano bass line.
It was Joe's concept,” says Preston. He had a drum sound, that forward drum sound, which no other engineer at that time would have conceived of doing, and with echo. And Joe created this at a time when I was being told that the rhythm section should be felt and not heard. He was the first man to use what they then called distortion. I know what they call it now — now they build it into gear! And that made a hit out of what would otherwise have been another track on a jazz EP. It was purely a concept of sound.”Bad Penny Blues” made it into the Top 20 on the pop hit parade.
INSIDE THE BOX
It was during his time at Lansdowne that Meek built his now famous black boxes. One was a Pultec-style equalizer that Nigel Woodward, its current owner, describes as probably the warmest, smoothest, most transparent equalizer ever made.” Another of his black boxes was a Langevin-style compressor/limiter, which Kerridge now owns (see the sidebar Meek's Black Boxes”). Meek left both units at Lansdowne when he departed.
The third and most important black box was a spring reverb unit made from a broken fan heater. According to Kerridge, It worked very well, and Joe was very secretive about it. To my knowledge, this was probably the first spring echo unit of its kind. It produced a very twangy and reverberant sound that he used to great effect on many of his recordings.” (That was a year before Alan Young developed the Accutronics Type 4 reverb unit for the Hammond Organ Company in the United States.)
SOUND EFFECTS
As a young man, Meek became quite skilled at designing original sounds and at recording unusual sounds from his environment. While at IBC, he put those skills to good use. When vocalist Anne Shelton recorded Lay Down Your Arms,” a song with a military marching beat, the producers wanted to add the sound of actual marching soldiers. Instead, Meek had Kerridge shake a box of gravel back and forth, producing the same basic sound. The record was a massive hit.
Also while at Lansdowne, Meek began making recordings at his tiny Arundel Gardens flat. One of those recordings was a full-length LP that employed several unique recording techniques and featured an extraordinary variety of original sound effects.
HEARING NEW WORLDS
In 1959 Meek recorded his Outer Space Music Fantasy” called I Hear a New World. (The original recording was released on CD for the first time as an addition to my Creative Music Production: Joe Meek's Bold Techniques, originally published by MixBooks in 2001. Previous CD releases contained a drastically altered version of dubious historical significance.) The recording was not only made in his apartment but also recorded in stereo. In addition to engineering the record, Meek composed all of the music. His musical concepts were arranged by Rod Freeman and performed by a group called the Blue Men. How Meek was able to work in stereo remains a mystery, as nobody who was there at the time recalls seeing any stereo machines, much less a stereo mixer.
That largely neglected recording is interesting because it provides fascinating insights into how an early audio innovator, working at the dawn of commercial stereo, dealt with issues such as phase relationships, imaging, and the juxtaposition of dry and processed sounds. Beyond that, Meek's use of signal processing, tape manipulation, and tape loops put the record in a class by itself.
And then there are the sounds. In addition to bass, drums, and guitar, the instruments Meek used included a homemade steel guitar, a tube-powered keyboard called a Clavioline, a piano with thumbtacks in the hammers, and test oscillators processed in various ways. Meek also used his tape delay as an instrument by pushing it into self-oscillation with over-the-top regeneration. Sound effects included bubbles blown through drinking straws, a comb scraped across an ashtray, shorted electrical circuits, and milk bottles played with spoons.
Meek often processed sounds as they were recorded. Tapes were processed by changing speeds, playing them backward, or splicing loops.
Meek wanted to go beyond the static stereo recordings that were being made at the time, by introducing motion into his mixes. On a promotional recording made in 1960, Meek remarked, I've tried — and I've had to do it rather carefully — to create the impression of space, of things moving in front of you, of a picture of parts of the moon.”
Sometimes he did that by panning a sound from one side to the also used the reverb and echo returns to create motion by panning the dry sound to one side and the effect return to the other, or by having the processed and dry sounds on one side, but the effect bleeding over to the other side. On March of the Dribcots,” Meek made the sounds march” from one side to the other by continuously varying the balance of high and low frequencies for each sound.
On the title track of I Hear a New World, Meek used loops and other forms of tape manipulation to great effect. The core of the song is a repeating three-note bass line that is either a tape loop or a very steady bassist; the drummer syncs to the bass loop. The vocal track is sung in rounds of three, with different processing on each round. Two voices in tight harmony sing the first line. The same line,with identical phrasing, then repeats with different EQ and voices on the third line are sped up to double time so that they are pitched an octave higher.
The phrasing of the sped-up vocal follows that of the other two parts. To get that effect, the vocalist sang at half speed and time (perhaps at 15 ips) and was recorded onto one machine while listening to the backing track playing at half speed on another. When the slow track played back at the higher speed (30ips), it was roughly in sync with the original, though it was pitched an octave higher. The new track was then transferred onto the master recorder.
304 HOLLOWAY ROAD
Although he couldn't play an instrument, was tone-deaf, and had little sense of rhythm, Meek had been writing songs and lyrics for years. Les Paul and Mary Ford had a hit with his Put a Ring on My Finger.” Meek used the money he received from that to co-found Triumph Records, one of England's first truly independent pop record labels, in 1960. Besides producing albums, Meek acted as A&R man,choosing — and in some cases managing — the artists and bands that he recorded (a practice that continued long after Triumph's demise).
Meek resigned from his position with the label after only nine months and formed a partnership with a film company owner who helped bankroll a new recording studio. Meek located the studio in a three-level flat above a leather shop on a busy street in a bleak section of north London. He lived and worked at 304 Holloway Road for the rest of his life.
The studio was on the third floor and could be reached only by climbing several steep flights of narrow stairs. The stairs are nearly as legendary as the studio itself: musicians who angered Meek were routinely thrown down them, followed by their gear. The recording area,which measured approximately 18 by 14 feet, was at the front of the building, with two large windows overlooking the street. The11-by-12-foot control room had no direct view of the recording area;Meek had to run back and forth between the two rooms to communicate with the musicians.
The studio windows were insulated, and then boards were nailed over them and acoustic tile and drapes were placed over the boards,” says Dave Adams, who helped prepare the studio.We heard very little outside sound.”
Meek described the studio as being the size of an average bedroom. No larger. I've covered the walls with acoustic tiles …all the walls except one, which is covered with a thick curtain.
This has very good absorbing power, and the studio is extremely dead. The floor is carpeted, and the ceiling is completely covered in tiles. One wall has some tiles missing, and this gives me a certain amount of brightness. But basically it's completely dead.”
In the rack (from top to bottom) are an unidentified rack unit, the Altec 438A compressor,
Meek's homemade mixer, the Vortexion 4/15/M mixer, two Quad preamps, the Fairchild
658 spring reverb unit, and several patch panels.
MEEK'S MACHINES
When trying to determine the gear that Meek used at 304 Holloway Road, it is important to remember that during a period of six years,lots of equipment that was not documented may have been used in the studio. In addition, simply knowing what gear was present in the studio doesn't necessarily offer much insight into the Meek sound, because he modified practically everything that he owned.
Those two points notwithstanding, two documents throw quite a bit of light on the subject: an RGM Sound (Meek's production company) equipment list showing capital expenditures for equipment during the period from September 19, 1960, to May 12, 1964, and an auction manifest of equipment compiled after Meek's death. A handful of photos of the studio control room taken at various times show important pieces of gear.
When the studio opened in 1960, Meek's main recorder was a Lyrec TR16 twin-track (see Fig. 2), an extremely high-quality Danish-made machine widely used within the film industry.
It ran at7.5, 15.0, and 30.0ips and accepted reel sizes as wide as 11.5 inches,including cine spools. A stock TR16 did not have synchronized record and playback heads (an overdub on track 2 would therefore be out of sync with track 1), but Meek modified his machine for that also had two EMI recorders: a two-head TR50 and a three-head TR51,both full-track mono machines. By late 1962, he had added a three-head Vortexion WVB, which he used to produce tape delay (see Fig. 3).By early 1963, he'd acquired EMI BTR2 and Ampex Model 300 professional full-track recorders.
In the earliest days, Meek's primary mixer was a 4-channel homemade device with variable top lift (a British term for high-frequency boost) on each channel. Small line mixers were also used to sum line-level feeds from various sources. By September of 1962, Meek had added a broadcast-quality Vortexion 4/15/M 4-channel mixer. Together,the two units provided a total of eight high-quality mixer channels— four with EQ — that could be combined in various ways.Although he added a 6-channel stereo mixer in late 1964, most 304 Holloway Road recordings were made using the two 4-channel mono mixers.
Meek also had several preamplifiers with multiple inputs that he used as auxiliary mixers. Included was a modified RCA Orthophonic hi-fi preamp/filter unit that he referred to as his cooker. The Orthophonic provided three inputs, had simple tone controls, and could be easily overdriven into a smooth and musical distortion. The device was most often used to fatten up lead vocals, but it also served as a backing vocal submixer (see Fig. 4). At some point, Meek also acquired RCA and Dyna preamps, which he could have used to add inputs or tone coloration when necessary.
PROCESSORS AND MICS
His selection of outboard gear was quite limited. At first Meek had only a few dynamics processors, including a 30-year-old BBC limiter and a homemade compressor. In February 1963, he acquired Altec 438A and436B compressors, and by September he added several Fairchild dynamics processors: a Model 660 limiting amplifier, a Model 663 compact compressor, a Model 661 Auto Ten, and a Model 673 Dynalizer. He obtained a second Model 673 four months later and a Model 655 after that. Around 1966 Meek also acquired a Fairchild 658 professional spring reverb, which is pictured in photographs of his control room from that period.
Equalizers were equally scarce. In early 1963, the selection in Meek's possession was limited to a tone-control unit and a midlift control, both probably homemade. According to Ted Fletcher, who worked with Meek in 1963 or 1964, some of Meek's other EQs were things in tobacco tins, with little inductors and capacitors soldered together.” Meek also added EMI 843 and 844 passive equalizers and an IBC CU-3H active equalizer to the studio at some point.
Meek's main microphones were two Neumann U 47s, which he used primarily on vocals; six AKG D 19/60 dynamics for instruments; and two Reslo ribbon mics — one for vocal groups (working both sides of it) and a heavy-duty model for kick drum. He also had a Neumann SM 2stereo condenser (which broke continually), and HMV 235CH and Western Electric ribbon mics that he used less frequently. By the end of his career, Meek had added Telefunken NSH, Elam models 250 and 251, Beyer models M61 and M23, and RCA variable impedance and dynamic microphones.
Because he was creating mono mixes, Meek monitored on a single Tannoy Red, a popular reference speaker used in recording and broadcast studios throughout Britain and Europe.
The Red employed Tannoy's dual-concentric speaker design: in this case, a high-frequency driver mounted at the center of a 15-inch woofer. Meek powered the system using audiophile-quality Quad preamps and power amps.
The wires that connected Meek's gear snaked across the floor or were suspended in midair. Many, if not most, of the wires had no plugs on the ends; Meek just twisted the wires together. But cables weren't the only things that covered the floor: tape boxes were piled everywhere,and discarded bits of edited tape reportedly rose to ankle height.
EARLY RECORDINGS
In November of 1962, Meek recorded himself walking around his studio, describing his gear and the way he used it. The following is an excerpt:
The main machine is a Lyrec TR16 twin-track. I usually record the voice on one track and the backing on the other. The other recorder is an EMI TR51; this I use for dubbing. The artist has his microphone, a Neumann U 47, in the corner of the studio, screened off from the rest of the musicians. He can sing his heart out without anyone taking notice of him. He's going on a separate track of the Lyrec. The bass is fed in direct, the guitars have microphones in front of their amplifiers, and the drum kit has two or three microphones placed around it.
Then, I dub the artist's voice on again. I listen to the tracks that we've already got. … Sometimes they're good enough,but as a rule, the vocalist wears headphones and the track's played back to him, and it's dubbed onto my TR51. So we have voice and rhythm tracks.”
Notice that Meek does not record the voice onto the second track of the Lyrec, as he had the guide vocal cut at the same time as the rhythm track. Instead, he mixes it in real time with the rhythm track from track 1 of the Lyrec, straight to the EMI TR51, saving a generation of track bouncing. Meek continues:
Sometimes we use four strings, never any more: four violins, perhaps a French horn, and a harp. Sometimes a choir, perhaps three girls. The method I use for recording strings is to have a microphone pretty close to them. The four of them sit in opposing pairs, and then I delay the signal with the third head of the Vortexion. I feed this back in again, which adds a reflection that gives you eight strings. On this I put my echo-chamber sound and also some of my electronic echo. After I've finished, I've ended up dubbing from my TR51 onto one track of the Lyrec. And after recording the orchestra on the Lyrec's second track I have the extra orchestra on one side, and the voice and the rhythm track on the other. And that's all I do at my premises. I then edit out the best takes, and go along to IBC and mold them together.”
Meek was fanatical about separation, as difficult as it was to achieve in his Holloway Road flat. When miking guitar amps (which were usually Vox AC30s), he'd place an AKG D 19 right against the grille and then throw a heavy blanket over it. Similarly, he'd place a Reslo ribbon mic in front of a bass drum and put a heavy blanket over it,taped to the toms. The latter technique became commonplace a few years later, but Fletcher and others believe that it originated with Meek.
Meek made hundreds of recordings during his first couple of years at304 Holloway Road, but two of them are particularly significant:Telstar” and Johnny, Remember Me.”
JOHNNY, REMEMBER ME
Recorded in middle 1961, Johnny, Remember Me” is considered by many to be Meek's most impressive recording, and it was also his first No. 1 hit. The record was a death disc about a guy who hears his dead lover's voice calling to him from across the moors. Meek's seance-loving partner, Geoff Goddard, claimed that spirits helped him write the song. In fact, Goddard and Meek believed that regularly they were visited and assisted by the spirit of Buddy Holly.
The song is still impressive, with its sweeping sonic grandeur and otherworldly authority. At the time it was released, however, it was absolutely revolutionary.
When interviewed for the Meek documentary on the BBC program Arena, vocalist John Leyton remembered the session this way:When I recorded ‘Johnny, Remember Me,' I was in the sitting room behind a little screen, and the rhythm section was in the room with me. The violin section was on the stairs, the backing singers were practically in the loo, and the brass section was underneath, on another floor altogether. And there was Joe next door, playing his machine like another musical instrument. It was quite bizarre. We did it over and over.
Joe wanted plenty of exciting atmosphere in it, and it was a really exhilarating sound with the galloping, driving beat.Joe was getting all excited, slapping his leg and combing his quiff.” Elsewhere, guitarist Reg Hawkins relates how they had to play the track repeatedly for an hour, after which his hand bled.
Brass and strings may be on the recording, but if so, they are hard to distinguish. The predominant instruments are the acoustic and electric guitars, bass, hi-hat-driven drums, and either a harp or a sped-up piano. Other sounds emerge in some places, but they are mostly washes of sustained tones with little harmonic definition. Meek combined and submixed the sounds in the same way that a synthesist layers patches from several synthesizers and treats them as one brought the sound cluster in and out as it suited him. He also added fairly long delays on a few keywords here and there, which at the time was quite novel.
It is estimated that Johnny, Remember Me” has more than30 tape splices. Unless they were of the rhythm tracks, Meek probably bounced vocal overdubs to blank tape (along with the backing track)until he had enough usable bits to work with. Then, when he edited the best parts together, the rhythm tracks already would be in sync, making it more difficult to detect the splices.
TELSTAR
Telstar,” inspired by the satellite that ushered in the telecommunications age, was Meek's biggest hit. It spent two weeks at the top of the U.S. charts in December 1962 and reached similar heights throughout the world.
From a recording perspective, Telstar” is has so many overdubs that the underlying layer of sound,particularly in the low mid frequencies, is little more than a sonic blur. There are several drum parts, two bass parts, a triple-tracked Clavioline (spanning three octaves), a sped-up piano playing harp-like arpeggios, and a gorgeous solo guitar during the breaks.
An abundance of speculation has surfaced regarding the sound effects that open and close Telstar.” One common theory is that Meek recorded a flushing toilet and then reversed the tape, but if you play the record in reverse, you will not hear any obvious flushing sounds. What you will hear are sounds reminiscent of those found on I Hear a New World, which were almost certainly produced the same way.
If you have ever plugged a microphone into a tape echo and cranked up the regeneration while making plosive and other vocal sounds, you'll recognize much of what you're hearing on Telstar.” Meek ran the source sounds — whatever they were — through a spring reverb and a tape delay, with the tape regeneration set so high that it went into self-oscillation. You mostly hear the sound of the oscillating tape delay and not the source sound. He also captured a spring sound by knocking on his reverb device, and a tapping sound probably produced by tuning a pair of test oscillators close enough tot he same pitch to cause beating. Those sounds were edited together and then reversed by turning the tape around.
BTR, TOO
Royalties from Telstar” provided Meek with enough money to buy some impressive new gear. He was unable to get satisfactory results mixing the Lyrec's two tracks down to mono on the TR51. As a result, he purchased an EMI BTR2 professional full-track recorder in February 1963. Having two pro machines to work with made signal degradation from track bouncing much less of a problem, letting him modify his recording technique.
According to guitarist and recording engineer Peter Miller, who worked with Meek then, Meek only had two machines. He would very often get the band recorded onto the Lyrec, which was usually his first machine. He would put the band on one track and put the vocal on the second track. The vocal track would also include maybe a guitar track or solo sax or something else — whatever lead instrument wasn't playing at the same time as the vocal. And then he would mix that onto his EMI BTR2 mono 1-track. And at the time that he'd do the mix, he would add on anything else that he wanted — either another track or effects processing.”
Fletcher describes a modified version of the same technique.The technique he used most of the time while I was there was to lay down the backing track on the full track of the BTR2 so that the recording occupied the full quarter-inch in mono,” he says.He would then remove the tape and put it on to the Lyrec machine, where he would erase one half. There would still be the original backing track on the one half of the tape, and he would add tot hat either the lead voice or backing vocal on the other half of the track. He would then mix the backing track and the vocal track together live while he was recording another part and send the three elements back to the BTR2, in mono on full-track. If he had everything he wanted by then, he would do a final mixdown with additional compression and EQ.” In both cases, Meek might add an additional track in real time as he mixed down to mono, with additional processing at any point long the way.
A month after getting the BTR2, Meek purchased an Ampex Model 300, another professional full-track mono machine. Having two pro full-tracks gave Meek increased recording options. For example, by bouncing between them, he could build up a rhythm track using the full width of the tape and only have to go to half-width (on the Lyrec) once. Meek also purchased an Ampex 351/2 twin-track at some point,giving him 2-track bouncing capabilities, and an Ampex twin-track emipro model called a PR10 (see Fig. 6). It is rumored that
Meek also had an Ampex multitrack in 1966, but the evidence is inconclusive.
LAST RIGHTS
In 1964 Meek had his final No. 1 U.K. hit with Have I the Right?” by the Honeycombs (featuring female drummerHoney” Lantree). The tune went to No. 4 in the United States and topped the charts in Australia, Japan, South Africa, and Sweden. Have I the Right?” is best known for itsstomping” gimmick. To generate a really big kick-drum sound, Meek placed microphones below the wooden studio stairs and had several musicians stomp along in time with the music. But that wasn't all.
On the final mix of ‘Have I the Right?,' we were just sort of tickling it up and getting the master ready with Joe late one evening,” Fletcher recalls. The ‘come right back' line still wasn't heavy enough for him. He tried all sorts of things to get this right: we kicked cardboard boxes, hit cardboard boxes with sticks, and in the end, he said, ‘No, Guy Fletcher's brother, it's not loud enough. What you've got to do is this.'And he put an AKG D 19 microphone on a little short stand on the floor and gave a tambourine to my brother and said, ‘Hit the microphone with the tambourine.' So my brother gently tickled the microphone, and Joe said, ‘No, no — hit it, hit it, hit it!' During the takes, my brother was smashing this tambourine onto the top of the microphone so hard that he completely destroyed the microphone and the tambourine. There's a horrible cracking noise on the record, and if you listen carefully, you can hear it.”
LEGACY
It is commonly held that Meek was a casualty of the British Invasion and that he got further and further out of touch as the '60s progressed. Critics point out that he had practically no hits in 1965 and '66, suggesting that the music simply wasn't up to par. That may be true generally, though he made some extraordinary recordings during that period, many of which were never released.
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LISTENING TO MEEK
Nearly all of Joe Meek's major recordings were mixed to mono. Now people tend to think of mono as the same sounds coming out of the right and left speakers with no stereo separation, but Meek mixed using one speaker. Remember that, during Meek's entire career, most people listened to music on one speaker. Meek's records were targeted largely to teens, most of whom listened on inexpensive phonographs and even less expensive transistor radios. So if you want to hear the recordings the way they were intended to be heard, you should listen to them on a single speaker.
DELAY, REVERB, AND ECHO
The terms delay, reverb, and echo are often usedinterchangeably when describing Joe Meek's sound. However, theyindicate three distinct effects.
Delay in the '50s and early '60s meant mechanical delay. It wasachieved most commonly by using a three-head tape recorder (see Fig.A1). A three-head machine has a gap between the record and playbackheads. Consequently, if the playback head is on at the same time that asound is recorded onto the tape, there is a short delay while the tapetravels from one head to the other. The delay time is adjusted bychanging the tape speed.
Reverb was not a common audio term in the 1950s. By the early '60s,the term had largely come to mean spring reverb (see Fig. A2).(Plate-reverb technology had been developed by the late '50s, but noevidence suggests that Meek had access to it.) Spring-reverb units aredevices with transducers connected to the ends of a group of springs.Sound passes through the springs and comes out the other side slightlydelayed, with a characteristic spring sound.
In the mid-'50s, British recording engineers were, in fact, engineers, to the point that they wore white lab coats. Producers, on the other hand, wore suits. Engineers executed standard procedures that were developed to record sounds with the greatest possible fidelity, whereas producers, who were charged with making the creative decisions, rarely understood recording technology. Equally important, both classes of professionals were employees of large studios and record companies. Truly independent engineers and producers were unheard of at the time.
Meek changed all that. In the process, he provoked an industry-wide backlash that is difficult to understand from a modern perspective because most of his innovations have been so thoroughly absorbed into common practice that they are hardly noticeable. Besides breaking nearly all the prevailing audio-engineering rules, he demonstrated that an individual could engineer and produce million-selling records in a home studio. Although Meek's gear seems downright primitive now, his studio techniques can be put to use in today's personal studios.
LONDON CALLING
Robert George Joe” Meek, born on April 5, 1929, was a precocious child. By the time he was ten, he had written, cast, and produced theatrical performances by and for the children in his village, and he had built a crystal radio set, a microphone, and a single-tube amplifier. At age 14, he upgraded his rig and worked dances and parties as a mobile DJ; at 16, he acted as musical supervisor and provided sound effects for local theater groups. In the summer of 1953, he built a disk cutter that he used to cut his first record, a sound-effects library.
Meek began his professional recording career in 1955, working as an engineer for IBC, the largest and most advanced studio in London. From 1955 to 1957, he engineered dozens of hit recordings for major British stars, often adding sonic touches that distinguished them from other pop recordings of the time. He tweaked the tape recorders to get more level on tape, placed mics close to sources rather than at thecorrect” distance, and used compressors and limiters for creative rather than corrective purposes. Perhaps worst of all, Meek sometimes intentionally distorted preamplifier inputs!
Many producers resented what they perceived as Meek's challenges to their authority, but his recordings had a funny way of becoming major hits; at the end of the day, that's what mattered to the artists and the record companies. Because so many of Meek's recordings became hits,some producers, including jazz and world-fusion pioneer Denis Preston, refused to work with anyone else.
But Meek was not happy working within the confines of IBC. The studio manager and many members of the staff resented Meek's attitude— as well as his tendency to throw fits when he didn't get his way — and they treated him badly. Much of that can be ascribed to professional jealousy, but it was no doubt exacerbated by the fact that Meek was homosexual. Of course, that didn't keep the rotten pigs,” as Meek called them, from trying to steal his secrets.”
It had three heads, took reels as wide as 8.25 inches, and ran at 15 and 7.5ips.
(John Repsch)
BEEN THERE, DONE THAT
While working at IBC and Lansdowne, Meek set a number of precedents in the English recording studio. Besides being the first to put microphones close to (and sometimes inside) sound sources, Meek experimented extensively with microphone selection, which gave him a broader palette of sounds.
He also worked with reflective surfaces. For example, he had trumpet sections play against a cement wall to record early reflections at IBC,and he sometimes used large movable Lucite panels to liven up the sound of a dead room at Lansdowne. Other reflective surfaces useful to Meek included those inside the echo chambers in both studios (see the sidebar Delay, Reverb, and Echo”).
Meek was the first engineer in the United Kingdom to use compressors to create pumping and breathing effects rather than merely to control dynamic range. He also pushed limiters to the max to get the hottest possible levels on tape and took advantage of analog tape's natural compression characteristics. It is also likely that Meek was one of the first engineers to direct inject the electric bass by plugging it straight in to the mixer.
In addition, Meek began experimenting while at IBC with sound-on-sound recording using two recorders. According to veteran engineer and producer Adrian Kerridge, who worked with Meek at the time, He and producer Michael Barclay used to work what they called composites, which they made track by track by track. What they were in effect doing was multitrack recording using the composite method. Nobody else to my knowledge in London, in fact, in Europe— I don't know about America — was working this way at that time.”
Kerridge also reports that while at Lansdowne from 1958 through1959, Meek used two tape recorders to produce flanging, an effect usually considered to have been developed in the mid-'60s. It was very successful,” Kerridge adds, and we used it a lot, together with expansion, compression, and limiting.”
OUTSIDE THE BOX
Changing the way individual sound sources were recorded was only one aspect of Meek's vision. Ultimately, he revamped the entire recording process and arrived at entirely new ways of working. For example,British pop recordings made in the mid- to late '50s had a lot ofroom” sound. Microphones were placed away from sound sources, and separation was achieved by keeping the musicians apart from each other. Meek close-miked sources, largely eliminating the room sound, and then used compressor/limiters to tighten up the sounds and give them more punch. Whatever ambience was lost because of the close-miking technique was made up for by sending everything to an echo chamber. That basic concept, though so common now that it's taken for granted, was considered radical (and wrong) at the time.
Trad-jazz trumpeter Humphrey Lyttleton's Bad Penny Blues” is one of the best-known examples of the way Meek's approach changed the character of recordings for the better. The song was built around a rolling boogie-woogie piano bass line and pushed along by a snare drum played with brushes. Meek compressed the dynamic range of all the instruments far beyond what was usual for jazz recordings, but he also made the brushes prominent and intentionally distorted the piano bass line.
It was Joe's concept,” says Preston. He had a drum sound, that forward drum sound, which no other engineer at that time would have conceived of doing, and with echo. And Joe created this at a time when I was being told that the rhythm section should be felt and not heard. He was the first man to use what they then called distortion. I know what they call it now — now they build it into gear! And that made a hit out of what would otherwise have been another track on a jazz EP. It was purely a concept of sound.”Bad Penny Blues” made it into the Top 20 on the pop hit parade.
INSIDE THE BOX
It was during his time at Lansdowne that Meek built his now famous black boxes. One was a Pultec-style equalizer that Nigel Woodward, its current owner, describes as probably the warmest, smoothest, most transparent equalizer ever made.” Another of his black boxes was a Langevin-style compressor/limiter, which Kerridge now owns (see the sidebar Meek's Black Boxes”). Meek left both units at Lansdowne when he departed.
The third and most important black box was a spring reverb unit made from a broken fan heater. According to Kerridge, It worked very well, and Joe was very secretive about it. To my knowledge, this was probably the first spring echo unit of its kind. It produced a very twangy and reverberant sound that he used to great effect on many of his recordings.” (That was a year before Alan Young developed the Accutronics Type 4 reverb unit for the Hammond Organ Company in the United States.)
SOUND EFFECTS
As a young man, Meek became quite skilled at designing original sounds and at recording unusual sounds from his environment. While at IBC, he put those skills to good use. When vocalist Anne Shelton recorded Lay Down Your Arms,” a song with a military marching beat, the producers wanted to add the sound of actual marching soldiers. Instead, Meek had Kerridge shake a box of gravel back and forth, producing the same basic sound. The record was a massive hit.
Also while at Lansdowne, Meek began making recordings at his tiny Arundel Gardens flat. One of those recordings was a full-length LP that employed several unique recording techniques and featured an extraordinary variety of original sound effects.
HEARING NEW WORLDS
In 1959 Meek recorded his Outer Space Music Fantasy” called I Hear a New World. (The original recording was released on CD for the first time as an addition to my Creative Music Production: Joe Meek's Bold Techniques, originally published by MixBooks in 2001. Previous CD releases contained a drastically altered version of dubious historical significance.) The recording was not only made in his apartment but also recorded in stereo. In addition to engineering the record, Meek composed all of the music. His musical concepts were arranged by Rod Freeman and performed by a group called the Blue Men. How Meek was able to work in stereo remains a mystery, as nobody who was there at the time recalls seeing any stereo machines, much less a stereo mixer.
That largely neglected recording is interesting because it provides fascinating insights into how an early audio innovator, working at the dawn of commercial stereo, dealt with issues such as phase relationships, imaging, and the juxtaposition of dry and processed sounds. Beyond that, Meek's use of signal processing, tape manipulation, and tape loops put the record in a class by itself.
And then there are the sounds. In addition to bass, drums, and guitar, the instruments Meek used included a homemade steel guitar, a tube-powered keyboard called a Clavioline, a piano with thumbtacks in the hammers, and test oscillators processed in various ways. Meek also used his tape delay as an instrument by pushing it into self-oscillation with over-the-top regeneration. Sound effects included bubbles blown through drinking straws, a comb scraped across an ashtray, shorted electrical circuits, and milk bottles played with spoons.
Meek often processed sounds as they were recorded. Tapes were processed by changing speeds, playing them backward, or splicing loops.
Meek wanted to go beyond the static stereo recordings that were being made at the time, by introducing motion into his mixes. On a promotional recording made in 1960, Meek remarked, I've tried — and I've had to do it rather carefully — to create the impression of space, of things moving in front of you, of a picture of parts of the moon.”
Sometimes he did that by panning a sound from one side to the also used the reverb and echo returns to create motion by panning the dry sound to one side and the effect return to the other, or by having the processed and dry sounds on one side, but the effect bleeding over to the other side. On March of the Dribcots,” Meek made the sounds march” from one side to the other by continuously varying the balance of high and low frequencies for each sound.
On the title track of I Hear a New World, Meek used loops and other forms of tape manipulation to great effect. The core of the song is a repeating three-note bass line that is either a tape loop or a very steady bassist; the drummer syncs to the bass loop. The vocal track is sung in rounds of three, with different processing on each round. Two voices in tight harmony sing the first line. The same line,with identical phrasing, then repeats with different EQ and voices on the third line are sped up to double time so that they are pitched an octave higher.
The phrasing of the sped-up vocal follows that of the other two parts. To get that effect, the vocalist sang at half speed and time (perhaps at 15 ips) and was recorded onto one machine while listening to the backing track playing at half speed on another. When the slow track played back at the higher speed (30ips), it was roughly in sync with the original, though it was pitched an octave higher. The new track was then transferred onto the master recorder.
304 HOLLOWAY ROAD
Although he couldn't play an instrument, was tone-deaf, and had little sense of rhythm, Meek had been writing songs and lyrics for years. Les Paul and Mary Ford had a hit with his Put a Ring on My Finger.” Meek used the money he received from that to co-found Triumph Records, one of England's first truly independent pop record labels, in 1960. Besides producing albums, Meek acted as A&R man,choosing — and in some cases managing — the artists and bands that he recorded (a practice that continued long after Triumph's demise).
Meek resigned from his position with the label after only nine months and formed a partnership with a film company owner who helped bankroll a new recording studio. Meek located the studio in a three-level flat above a leather shop on a busy street in a bleak section of north London. He lived and worked at 304 Holloway Road for the rest of his life.
The studio was on the third floor and could be reached only by climbing several steep flights of narrow stairs. The stairs are nearly as legendary as the studio itself: musicians who angered Meek were routinely thrown down them, followed by their gear. The recording area,which measured approximately 18 by 14 feet, was at the front of the building, with two large windows overlooking the street. The11-by-12-foot control room had no direct view of the recording area;Meek had to run back and forth between the two rooms to communicate with the musicians.
The studio windows were insulated, and then boards were nailed over them and acoustic tile and drapes were placed over the boards,” says Dave Adams, who helped prepare the studio.We heard very little outside sound.”
Meek described the studio as being the size of an average bedroom. No larger. I've covered the walls with acoustic tiles …all the walls except one, which is covered with a thick curtain.
This has very good absorbing power, and the studio is extremely dead. The floor is carpeted, and the ceiling is completely covered in tiles. One wall has some tiles missing, and this gives me a certain amount of brightness. But basically it's completely dead.”
In the rack (from top to bottom) are an unidentified rack unit, the Altec 438A compressor,
Meek's homemade mixer, the Vortexion 4/15/M mixer, two Quad preamps, the Fairchild
658 spring reverb unit, and several patch panels.
MEEK'S MACHINES
When trying to determine the gear that Meek used at 304 Holloway Road, it is important to remember that during a period of six years,lots of equipment that was not documented may have been used in the studio. In addition, simply knowing what gear was present in the studio doesn't necessarily offer much insight into the Meek sound, because he modified practically everything that he owned.
Those two points notwithstanding, two documents throw quite a bit of light on the subject: an RGM Sound (Meek's production company) equipment list showing capital expenditures for equipment during the period from September 19, 1960, to May 12, 1964, and an auction manifest of equipment compiled after Meek's death. A handful of photos of the studio control room taken at various times show important pieces of gear.
When the studio opened in 1960, Meek's main recorder was a Lyrec TR16 twin-track (see Fig. 2), an extremely high-quality Danish-made machine widely used within the film industry.
It ran at7.5, 15.0, and 30.0ips and accepted reel sizes as wide as 11.5 inches,including cine spools. A stock TR16 did not have synchronized record and playback heads (an overdub on track 2 would therefore be out of sync with track 1), but Meek modified his machine for that also had two EMI recorders: a two-head TR50 and a three-head TR51,both full-track mono machines. By late 1962, he had added a three-head Vortexion WVB, which he used to produce tape delay (see Fig. 3).By early 1963, he'd acquired EMI BTR2 and Ampex Model 300 professional full-track recorders.
In the earliest days, Meek's primary mixer was a 4-channel homemade device with variable top lift (a British term for high-frequency boost) on each channel. Small line mixers were also used to sum line-level feeds from various sources. By September of 1962, Meek had added a broadcast-quality Vortexion 4/15/M 4-channel mixer. Together,the two units provided a total of eight high-quality mixer channels— four with EQ — that could be combined in various ways.Although he added a 6-channel stereo mixer in late 1964, most 304 Holloway Road recordings were made using the two 4-channel mono mixers.
Meek also had several preamplifiers with multiple inputs that he used as auxiliary mixers. Included was a modified RCA Orthophonic hi-fi preamp/filter unit that he referred to as his cooker. The Orthophonic provided three inputs, had simple tone controls, and could be easily overdriven into a smooth and musical distortion. The device was most often used to fatten up lead vocals, but it also served as a backing vocal submixer (see Fig. 4). At some point, Meek also acquired RCA and Dyna preamps, which he could have used to add inputs or tone coloration when necessary.
PROCESSORS AND MICS
His selection of outboard gear was quite limited. At first Meek had only a few dynamics processors, including a 30-year-old BBC limiter and a homemade compressor. In February 1963, he acquired Altec 438A and436B compressors, and by September he added several Fairchild dynamics processors: a Model 660 limiting amplifier, a Model 663 compact compressor, a Model 661 Auto Ten, and a Model 673 Dynalizer. He obtained a second Model 673 four months later and a Model 655 after that. Around 1966 Meek also acquired a Fairchild 658 professional spring reverb, which is pictured in photographs of his control room from that period.
Equalizers were equally scarce. In early 1963, the selection in Meek's possession was limited to a tone-control unit and a midlift control, both probably homemade. According to Ted Fletcher, who worked with Meek in 1963 or 1964, some of Meek's other EQs were things in tobacco tins, with little inductors and capacitors soldered together.” Meek also added EMI 843 and 844 passive equalizers and an IBC CU-3H active equalizer to the studio at some point.
Meek's main microphones were two Neumann U 47s, which he used primarily on vocals; six AKG D 19/60 dynamics for instruments; and two Reslo ribbon mics — one for vocal groups (working both sides of it) and a heavy-duty model for kick drum. He also had a Neumann SM 2stereo condenser (which broke continually), and HMV 235CH and Western Electric ribbon mics that he used less frequently. By the end of his career, Meek had added Telefunken NSH, Elam models 250 and 251, Beyer models M61 and M23, and RCA variable impedance and dynamic microphones.
Because he was creating mono mixes, Meek monitored on a single Tannoy Red, a popular reference speaker used in recording and broadcast studios throughout Britain and Europe.
The Red employed Tannoy's dual-concentric speaker design: in this case, a high-frequency driver mounted at the center of a 15-inch woofer. Meek powered the system using audiophile-quality Quad preamps and power amps.
The wires that connected Meek's gear snaked across the floor or were suspended in midair. Many, if not most, of the wires had no plugs on the ends; Meek just twisted the wires together. But cables weren't the only things that covered the floor: tape boxes were piled everywhere,and discarded bits of edited tape reportedly rose to ankle height.
EARLY RECORDINGS
In November of 1962, Meek recorded himself walking around his studio, describing his gear and the way he used it. The following is an excerpt:
The main machine is a Lyrec TR16 twin-track. I usually record the voice on one track and the backing on the other. The other recorder is an EMI TR51; this I use for dubbing. The artist has his microphone, a Neumann U 47, in the corner of the studio, screened off from the rest of the musicians. He can sing his heart out without anyone taking notice of him. He's going on a separate track of the Lyrec. The bass is fed in direct, the guitars have microphones in front of their amplifiers, and the drum kit has two or three microphones placed around it.
Then, I dub the artist's voice on again. I listen to the tracks that we've already got. … Sometimes they're good enough,but as a rule, the vocalist wears headphones and the track's played back to him, and it's dubbed onto my TR51. So we have voice and rhythm tracks.”
Notice that Meek does not record the voice onto the second track of the Lyrec, as he had the guide vocal cut at the same time as the rhythm track. Instead, he mixes it in real time with the rhythm track from track 1 of the Lyrec, straight to the EMI TR51, saving a generation of track bouncing. Meek continues:
Sometimes we use four strings, never any more: four violins, perhaps a French horn, and a harp. Sometimes a choir, perhaps three girls. The method I use for recording strings is to have a microphone pretty close to them. The four of them sit in opposing pairs, and then I delay the signal with the third head of the Vortexion. I feed this back in again, which adds a reflection that gives you eight strings. On this I put my echo-chamber sound and also some of my electronic echo. After I've finished, I've ended up dubbing from my TR51 onto one track of the Lyrec. And after recording the orchestra on the Lyrec's second track I have the extra orchestra on one side, and the voice and the rhythm track on the other. And that's all I do at my premises. I then edit out the best takes, and go along to IBC and mold them together.”
Meek was fanatical about separation, as difficult as it was to achieve in his Holloway Road flat. When miking guitar amps (which were usually Vox AC30s), he'd place an AKG D 19 right against the grille and then throw a heavy blanket over it. Similarly, he'd place a Reslo ribbon mic in front of a bass drum and put a heavy blanket over it,taped to the toms. The latter technique became commonplace a few years later, but Fletcher and others believe that it originated with Meek.
Meek made hundreds of recordings during his first couple of years at304 Holloway Road, but two of them are particularly significant:Telstar” and Johnny, Remember Me.”
JOHNNY, REMEMBER ME
Recorded in middle 1961, Johnny, Remember Me” is considered by many to be Meek's most impressive recording, and it was also his first No. 1 hit. The record was a death disc about a guy who hears his dead lover's voice calling to him from across the moors. Meek's seance-loving partner, Geoff Goddard, claimed that spirits helped him write the song. In fact, Goddard and Meek believed that regularly they were visited and assisted by the spirit of Buddy Holly.
The song is still impressive, with its sweeping sonic grandeur and otherworldly authority. At the time it was released, however, it was absolutely revolutionary.
When interviewed for the Meek documentary on the BBC program Arena, vocalist John Leyton remembered the session this way:When I recorded ‘Johnny, Remember Me,' I was in the sitting room behind a little screen, and the rhythm section was in the room with me. The violin section was on the stairs, the backing singers were practically in the loo, and the brass section was underneath, on another floor altogether. And there was Joe next door, playing his machine like another musical instrument. It was quite bizarre. We did it over and over.
Joe wanted plenty of exciting atmosphere in it, and it was a really exhilarating sound with the galloping, driving beat.Joe was getting all excited, slapping his leg and combing his quiff.” Elsewhere, guitarist Reg Hawkins relates how they had to play the track repeatedly for an hour, after which his hand bled.
Brass and strings may be on the recording, but if so, they are hard to distinguish. The predominant instruments are the acoustic and electric guitars, bass, hi-hat-driven drums, and either a harp or a sped-up piano. Other sounds emerge in some places, but they are mostly washes of sustained tones with little harmonic definition. Meek combined and submixed the sounds in the same way that a synthesist layers patches from several synthesizers and treats them as one brought the sound cluster in and out as it suited him. He also added fairly long delays on a few keywords here and there, which at the time was quite novel.
It is estimated that Johnny, Remember Me” has more than30 tape splices. Unless they were of the rhythm tracks, Meek probably bounced vocal overdubs to blank tape (along with the backing track)until he had enough usable bits to work with. Then, when he edited the best parts together, the rhythm tracks already would be in sync, making it more difficult to detect the splices.
TELSTAR
Telstar,” inspired by the satellite that ushered in the telecommunications age, was Meek's biggest hit. It spent two weeks at the top of the U.S. charts in December 1962 and reached similar heights throughout the world.
From a recording perspective, Telstar” is has so many overdubs that the underlying layer of sound,particularly in the low mid frequencies, is little more than a sonic blur. There are several drum parts, two bass parts, a triple-tracked Clavioline (spanning three octaves), a sped-up piano playing harp-like arpeggios, and a gorgeous solo guitar during the breaks.
An abundance of speculation has surfaced regarding the sound effects that open and close Telstar.” One common theory is that Meek recorded a flushing toilet and then reversed the tape, but if you play the record in reverse, you will not hear any obvious flushing sounds. What you will hear are sounds reminiscent of those found on I Hear a New World, which were almost certainly produced the same way.
If you have ever plugged a microphone into a tape echo and cranked up the regeneration while making plosive and other vocal sounds, you'll recognize much of what you're hearing on Telstar.” Meek ran the source sounds — whatever they were — through a spring reverb and a tape delay, with the tape regeneration set so high that it went into self-oscillation. You mostly hear the sound of the oscillating tape delay and not the source sound. He also captured a spring sound by knocking on his reverb device, and a tapping sound probably produced by tuning a pair of test oscillators close enough tot he same pitch to cause beating. Those sounds were edited together and then reversed by turning the tape around.
BTR, TOO
Royalties from Telstar” provided Meek with enough money to buy some impressive new gear. He was unable to get satisfactory results mixing the Lyrec's two tracks down to mono on the TR51. As a result, he purchased an EMI BTR2 professional full-track recorder in February 1963. Having two pro machines to work with made signal degradation from track bouncing much less of a problem, letting him modify his recording technique.
According to guitarist and recording engineer Peter Miller, who worked with Meek then, Meek only had two machines. He would very often get the band recorded onto the Lyrec, which was usually his first machine. He would put the band on one track and put the vocal on the second track. The vocal track would also include maybe a guitar track or solo sax or something else — whatever lead instrument wasn't playing at the same time as the vocal. And then he would mix that onto his EMI BTR2 mono 1-track. And at the time that he'd do the mix, he would add on anything else that he wanted — either another track or effects processing.”
Fletcher describes a modified version of the same technique.The technique he used most of the time while I was there was to lay down the backing track on the full track of the BTR2 so that the recording occupied the full quarter-inch in mono,” he says.He would then remove the tape and put it on to the Lyrec machine, where he would erase one half. There would still be the original backing track on the one half of the tape, and he would add tot hat either the lead voice or backing vocal on the other half of the track. He would then mix the backing track and the vocal track together live while he was recording another part and send the three elements back to the BTR2, in mono on full-track. If he had everything he wanted by then, he would do a final mixdown with additional compression and EQ.” In both cases, Meek might add an additional track in real time as he mixed down to mono, with additional processing at any point long the way.
A month after getting the BTR2, Meek purchased an Ampex Model 300, another professional full-track mono machine. Having two pro full-tracks gave Meek increased recording options. For example, by bouncing between them, he could build up a rhythm track using the full width of the tape and only have to go to half-width (on the Lyrec) once. Meek also purchased an Ampex 351/2 twin-track at some point,giving him 2-track bouncing capabilities, and an Ampex twin-track emipro model called a PR10 (see Fig. 6). It is rumored that
Meek also had an Ampex multitrack in 1966, but the evidence is inconclusive.
LAST RIGHTS
In 1964 Meek had his final No. 1 U.K. hit with Have I the Right?” by the Honeycombs (featuring female drummerHoney” Lantree). The tune went to No. 4 in the United States and topped the charts in Australia, Japan, South Africa, and Sweden. Have I the Right?” is best known for itsstomping” gimmick. To generate a really big kick-drum sound, Meek placed microphones below the wooden studio stairs and had several musicians stomp along in time with the music. But that wasn't all.
On the final mix of ‘Have I the Right?,' we were just sort of tickling it up and getting the master ready with Joe late one evening,” Fletcher recalls. The ‘come right back' line still wasn't heavy enough for him. He tried all sorts of things to get this right: we kicked cardboard boxes, hit cardboard boxes with sticks, and in the end, he said, ‘No, Guy Fletcher's brother, it's not loud enough. What you've got to do is this.'And he put an AKG D 19 microphone on a little short stand on the floor and gave a tambourine to my brother and said, ‘Hit the microphone with the tambourine.' So my brother gently tickled the microphone, and Joe said, ‘No, no — hit it, hit it, hit it!' During the takes, my brother was smashing this tambourine onto the top of the microphone so hard that he completely destroyed the microphone and the tambourine. There's a horrible cracking noise on the record, and if you listen carefully, you can hear it.”
LEGACY
It is commonly held that Meek was a casualty of the British Invasion and that he got further and further out of touch as the '60s progressed. Critics point out that he had practically no hits in 1965 and '66, suggesting that the music simply wasn't up to par. That may be true generally, though he made some extraordinary recordings during that period, many of which were never released.
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LISTENING TO MEEK
Nearly all of Joe Meek's major recordings were mixed to mono. Now people tend to think of mono as the same sounds coming out of the right and left speakers with no stereo separation, but Meek mixed using one speaker. Remember that, during Meek's entire career, most people listened to music on one speaker. Meek's records were targeted largely to teens, most of whom listened on inexpensive phonographs and even less expensive transistor radios. So if you want to hear the recordings the way they were intended to be heard, you should listen to them on a single speaker.
DELAY, REVERB, AND ECHO
The terms delay, reverb, and echo are often usedinterchangeably when describing Joe Meek's sound. However, theyindicate three distinct effects.
Delay in the '50s and early '60s meant mechanical delay. It wasachieved most commonly by using a three-head tape recorder (see Fig.A1). A three-head machine has a gap between the record and playbackheads. Consequently, if the playback head is on at the same time that asound is recorded onto the tape, there is a short delay while the tapetravels from one head to the other. The delay time is adjusted bychanging the tape speed.
Reverb was not a common audio term in the 1950s. By the early '60s,the term had largely come to mean spring reverb (see Fig. A2).(Plate-reverb technology had been developed by the late '50s, but noevidence suggests that Meek had access to it.) Spring-reverb units aredevices with transducers connected to the ends of a group of springs.Sound passes through the springs and comes out the other side slightlydelayed, with a characteristic spring sound.
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