Everyone is doing their own demos these days. I personally think this is one of the greatest things to happen to record making, the one problem I have is that often can barely understand or listen to the vocals recorded on many GarageBand or cheaply done demos. After the jump I will give you ten quick pointers that you may have missed that can help your vocals greatly, making it easier for all of us to listen to your demo.
1. Less Bass, Not More Treble - A general rule that everyone can follow for any voice of any type is that before you add any treble make sure that you have taken away all the bass that you don't need in the mix. When the vocal starts to sound to thin than you have gone too far. Only after you have gotten rid of all of the bass that you do not need should you even consider turning up the treble on your vocal.
2. If You Recorded With A Cheap Condenser, You Probably Don't Need To Add Treble - We have all heard demos with ear biting treble on the vocal. The fact is most cheap condenser mics are designed with a HUGE treble boost. Just like I advised above, get rid of all of the bass first and be extremely cautious adding any treble if you used a Condenser priced under $500, since most of them have a great amount of high end hype.
3. Turn The Reverb Decay Down - One of the biggest annoyances in demos that I get is a reverb that is so long it sounds like you recorded it in a cathedral. Most reverb programs have a decay knob, play with it a bit. Always go with shorter than longer when making a mix decision, we will all thank you for this later.
4. Turn The Reverb Down As Low As You Can Take It - I know in some indie rock circles everyone is falling in love with reverb but unless you are cranking up the verb as an aesthetic, err on the side of having it to loud rather than too loud.
5. Unless You Are Going For The T-Pain Sound Use Auto-Tune In Graphical Mode - I have news for you, it takes about an hour or two of reading or watching YouTubes to learn how to use AutoTune decently. If you want your vocals to not sound like every hip-hop song on the radio today, please switch to graphical mode and take one hour to learn how to use it.
6. Pop Filters Aren't Always Enough - Even when you buy some of the super expensive pop filters out there it does not mean that all your pop will be cured. Vocalists can still pop P's and kill our ears when we listen to your demo. If you turn down the bass on the vocal and have already applied a HPF to the vocal and you are still hearing a huge P, please punch it in.
7. Keep Your Mic Pre Gain Low - Unless you are going for a distorted gritty sound don't aim to get the waveform and level high. Keep it as low as possible and adjust it later with compression and fader volume. This will keep your vocal clear and from picking up lots of noise in your room.
8. Reverb Isn't The Only Effect - Try slapback delays, and quiet delays for giving your vocal some ambiance. As well reverb settings with really short decay times (150-350 ms) can do a great deal for keeping a vocal dry and up front without it sounding dry and cold.
9. If You Can't Hit The Notes Program A MIDI Track To Sing Along To - Keep in mind demos are often practice to get good at singing in the studio. If you are having trouble hitting notes, singing along to a keyboard playing their melody can do worlds of good for your pitch and intonation. It only takes a few minutes to play your melody in and have a great pitch reference.
10. When Tweaking The Mix Keep In Mind That You May Need To Tweak The Other Instruments To Make The Vocal Work - I probably spend most of my time mixing getting the other instruments out of the way of the vocal. Keep in mind the sound of the vocal is very much determined by what is eating it up in the mix. If you are having trouble with your vocal sound try EQing and changing levels on other instruments.
Wednesday 18 January 2017
Sunday 15 January 2017
Sound Techniques
In the summer of 1965, a new recording studio opened its doors in London's soon-to-be hip district of Chelsea. For a decade to come, this bijou ex-dairy would produce some of the finest British recordings of the era.
John Wood in the Sound Techniques control room, you're a fan of British '60s and '70s music, particularly psychedelic folk and folk-rock, you'll no doubt be familiar with a little tagline gracing the liner notes of some of your favourite records: "Recorded at Sound Techniques, Chelsea". John Cale, Nick Drake, Fairport Convention, Incredible String Band, Jethro Tull, John Martyn, Pentangle, Pink Floyd, Richard Thompson, Sandy Denny and Steeleye Span were just a few of the luminaries to grace this unassuming but hugely important English recording studio.
The early '60s was a time when the majority of studios in London had a reputation for being stuffy and oppressive: manned and administered by scientists in brown lab coats, who had little interest in the 'nasty' guitar music that had so rudely thrust itself upon them. But by the middle of the decade, these studios' dominance was being eroded by a handful of hip new young independents, bristling with young, enthusiastic engineers and producers with as much passion for popular music as the musicians they were recording. By the end of the '60s, Sound Techniques had firmly established itself as one of London's finest studios, drawing in anyone who cared about the quality of their recordings. Just take a listen to Nick Drake's Bryter Later or Judy Collins' In My Life and you'll know exactly what we're talking about when we refer to the unique 'Sound Techniques sound'.
Sound Techniques was the brainchild of Geoff Frost and John Wood, who in mid-1964 were both working at Levy's Sound Studio in New Bond Street, a very busy 'jobbing' studio where they spent much of their time producing 'copycat' versions of current hits for Woolworths' budget Embassy label, as well as laying down tracks for proprietor Morris Levy's own Oriole label. Geoff had been Chief Engineer at the studios since 1959, while John had joined the technical staff in '62. Their decision to start their own venture was partly due to the fact that they wanted to be their own bosses and partly because Morris Levy had just sold out to US giant CBS records, leaving the pair with some uncertainty about their future employment.
As was often the case with the music industry in the '60s, there was no grand design or meticulous planning involved in their decision.
"We decided we'd start a recording studio," John Wood tells me, "and with that wonderful ignorance-is-bliss mentality and impetuousness of youth, we thought we'd just get on and do it and do a better job than Levy's so Geoff left in the September of 1964 and started looking for premises, and that was it!"
The variety of different skills that Geoff, then 28, and John, 24, brought to the table helped ensure that Sound Techniques had an excellent grounding for future success. In his role as Chief Engineer at Levy's, Geoff had taken the lead technical role building and maintaining the equipment in addition to engineering sessions. John, meanwhile, had previously plied his trade in the cutting room of Decca Records prior to his move to Levy's, training his acute ear through many hours working with their classical catalogue.
The finance for the venture came via Geoff's savings and a loan from Barclays Bank, and the company was duly registered at Companies House in December 1964, after a name had been decided upon during a swift but inspired telephone conversation between the two entrepreneurs.
"Geoff rang me up from Peter Godfrey's office, who was our solicitor, saying, 'We've got to have a name for the company!'," laughs John, "and I'm sitting in the control room at Levy's, and there's a Pultec on the rack and an Altec compressor and I see Pulse Techniques underneath Pultec so I said, 'Well, what about Sotec or Sound Techniques?' and that's literally where our name came from. And it was a great name! The biggest mistake we made was not registering it across the world!"
As far as the studio premises go, Geoff and John already knew the kind of thing they should be looking for following Geoff's visit to the United States in '64.
"I got on a plane to Nashville to look at the American studios, to find out why they got so much better sounds than the English studios," Geoff tells me. "There was an incredible difference in the sound. American stuff was open, it was loud — the stuff from British studios was very sort of twee and dull. The sound coming out of America, particularly from Bradley's, really impressed me personally. So the first thing I did when we got off the plane was, after finding a hotel, I knocked on Bradley's door and said, 'I'm a chief engineer from London, is it possible for your chief engineer to show me round?' and they said, 'Well, of course!' And Bradley's was by the far the most impressive studio I saw and just the kind of studio that John and I wanted to build. It wasn't full of deadening materials like English studios were — with English studios the idea was to make everything as dead as possible, but Bradley's just had a very minimal acoustic treatment with a very high ceiling. They also had very minimal equipment. In order to make the English sound more and more American, English studios were buying up more and more equipment. But Bradley's had a very simple desk — I think it was an ex-broadcast desk, a Bendix or a Gates or something like that, and they had outboard EQs — they had Langevins, and all the Langevins were locked in at 3k 8dB boost position and left there!"
These deceptively straightforward lessons would be an important influence on the Sound Techniques story.
After months of trawling estate agents and trudging the streets of the capital, Geoff finally found a building with some potential. Situated near to Chelsea's King's Road and hiding down the end of a small alley, 46a Old Church Street was part of an early 19th-century dairy. Part of the ground floor belonged to a pottery, while the other part of the ground floor and the first and second floors were both available to lease. The deal Geoff and John negotiated included a clause giving them permission to remove part of the second floor to give them the height they required to get a 'Bradley's type sound'. A team of Polish builders was duly set to work to knock out the middle section, leaving the left and right sections in situ to be developed into the control room and an office respectively, both of which would be accessed by separate staircases leading from the live room. An eighth of an inch of asphalt was laid on the floor to dampen the sound to an extent — another Nashville tip — then covered with carpet, although the original gradual slope from the dairy days was left as it was, possibly contributing to the room's sound once they commenced recording. The time now came for a minimal amount of acoustic treatment.
"We cleaned the place up, put double glazing in where it was convenient to, where it wasn't convenient we didn't bother," says Geoff. "As far as acoustics go, John and I went around clapping our hands, and we'd say, 'Ooh, we need something up there!' but bearing in mind we were so short of money, we did as little as possible! Underneath the office, we left the old-fashioned lath-and-plaster ceiling, which did great things for strings."
The first mixer to bear the Sound Techniques name was custom-built by Geoff Frost and John Wood, and sold in order to fund the building of a desk for the studio the construction work had been completed, it was time to build the first Sound Techniques mixing desk. At this point, John Wood also left Levy's, and he and Geoff spent the next few months building the mixer in the middle of the studio's live room (see 'Sound Techniques Consoles' box). With regard to other equipment, John and Geoff were again limited by their rapidly disappearing budget, so they opted to build as much as they could themselves. They could not afford complete Ampex tape machines, so they managed to negotiate a deal in which they bought just the decks, leaving Geoff to build the electronics for three machines — one two-track, one four-track and one mono — which they housed in second-hand consoles purchased at the BBC's redundant equipment stores in Chiswick. Geoff also built four monitor speakers using a design from electronics bible the Audio Encyclopaedia and housed them in a single cabinet to "make things more rigid". The monitor speakers would change progressively as the studio's fortunes improved, and in 1968, as more 'rocky' artistes began to filter through the doors, the studio underwent a revamp, including the installation of an eight-channel desk designed by Geoff and more sophisticated acoustic treatments to make things a little less 'live'.
However, John and Geoff did splash some cash on an EMI limiter, a couple of Altec compressors and a slew of top-quality microphones including Neumann 67s, KM56s, KM54s, AKG D19s and an RCA ribbon. The studio would later move to 16-track and ultimately 24-track by the mid-'70s, and other later purchases included Neumann U47 microphones and Fairchild 660 limiters.
As far as reverb was concerned, John's preference was to buy an EMT plate but their funds had almost run dry, so the pair opted to use what little spare space they had to build an acoustic echo chamber by the front door out of a pre-fab garage kit of parts. But aside from the fact that it was a very small space, it also filled with water whenever it rained heavily so, not surprisingly, as soon as they could afford it they bought their first EMT.
Happy with how the studio was sounding after a few demo sessions, the two men decided that it was time to open for business — but London's music-biz fraternity was not exactly beating the doors down in anticipation.
"We put one advert in Kemp's music directory, which cost a bloody fortune, but we never had a single enquiry!" recalls Geoff. "We were sitting around waiting for the phone to ring for weeks and it didn't ring. In the end, I think we were about three days away from going bankrupt and the phone rang, and it was Frank Barber, who did all John Schroeder's arrangements at Levy's. He said, 'I've got a client who's looking for a studio. He wants to book it for four days a week for about four months and I can't find anywhere where we can get in!' so I said to Frank, 'All right Frank, just let me look at the diary!', and I did actually get the diary out and looked at all these blank pages — and I said, 'Well, Frank, I think we can probably move things around a little!'"
The client turned out to be prolific classical soundtrack composer Phil Green, who had been contracted by 3M to produce around a staggering 2000 tracks of soft orchestral 'elevator music' that they were planning to market with a new cassette-based system they had developed for retail outlets and hotels. Sound Techniques got the gig, and John and Geoff were left thanking the gods, although the first day's recording didn't go quite as planned.
A plan view of the layout of Sound Techniques. The control room and workshop were upstairs, leaving the central part of the live area with a high ceiling. "The interesting thing was that we'd always thought that we would put the strings in the middle of the room, where we had twice the ceiling height, and that they would sound good there," says John, "and we thought we'd put the rhythm section at the end under the office. On what must have been the first day of the Phil Green sessions, we put the strings in the middle, the rhythm under the office and I think we probably had brass as well under the control room — and it just didn't work. They complained they couldn't hear, they couldn't hear the rhythm and they couldn't hear this so we had to change the whole thing round and we ended up with the rhythm in the middle, the brass one end, and the strings under the office — and it worked fine!
Afterwards, that became our standard setup and the interesting thing was that the low end of the studio, where we would put the string section, had a sort of natural resonance around 500-700 Hz or something, and you would get this really big string sound from a small section. That was one of the things that I suppose we were quite lucky with or famed for in latter years the string sounds on the Nick Drake records people are always going on about!"
The Phil Green sessions proved to be a turning point for Sound Techniques Ltd and the work began to trickle in, largely because potential clients were so impressed by the tapes they heard. By this time, the company had also received orders from other studios for mixing desks, so Geoff immersed himself in console manufacturing in the upstairs office-cum-workshop while John settled into the role he would fill until the mid-'70s: Sound Techniques Studio Manager.
The original Sound Techniques 'Chelsea' mixer built by Frost and Wood, in the control even more significant turning point came when Elektra Records began booking time at the studio. Sound Techniques was recommended to the US label by mutual friend and EMI engineer Malcolm Addey. The first Elektra recordings to be made at Sound Techniques were two orchestral concept albums based around the signs of the zodiac and the sea, which John engineered with producer Mort Gamson. Elektra had decided to record in England for the same reason that 3M had opted to with their 'elevator music': British string players were both cheaper and of a higher quality than their American contemporaries. At the end of one of these sessions, the musicians needed paying, so Elektra head honcho Jac Holzman instructed his UK Office Manager to go down to Chelsea loaded with the lucre. The manager's name was Joe Boyd.
It would be the records that Joe worked on with John Wood for both Elektra and, later on, Joe's Witchseason Productions company that would first expose the Sound Techniques sound to the music-listening masses. Wood and Boyd immediately hit it off during Joe's first visit in early 1966. The early projects they worked on together were quickly recorded, straight-to-master-tape recordings of artists such as Alisdair Clayre, Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick, and the first Incredible String Band album. It would be during the recording of this latter record that the two became very close, and their relationship both in the live room and the control room would later bring the best out of Sandy Denny, Nick Drake, Fairport Convention, Pink Floyd and Richard Thompson, to name but a few. The way they worked was in no way your typical engineer/producer relationship — they worked in partnership.
"In some ways, some people found it a curious relationship, but for me it's the way I like to work with anybody, really," explains Joe Boyd. "I get nervous if I feel people are pulling their punches around me — you know, if someone disagrees with what I want to do, I want to hear about it and then at least I can make up my own mind. I want as much information as I can get, and John is very gruff and ready to speak his mind. He never suffer fools gladly and he's never shy of voicing an opinion. I find that a very good way to work because I want to know what he thinks of everything I'm doing — sometimes I had ideas that worked OK on paper but didn't in reality, and he'd sober me up when I was getting carried away with what the possibilities were, because John was always looking ahead to the mix and what would actually work."
There is a distinctively rich, colourful sound and style that filters through not just the Joe Boyd records but many other Sound Techniques recordings, to the extent that people have referred to it as the John Wood sound or the Sound Techniques sound. As with all the great studios in the era before excessive multitracking, the individual facets of a particular room gave each studio a unique sound, and the Sound Techniques live room certainly contributed to the great sounds it produced, with the high ceiling in the middle, the space under the office on the right-hand side that gave such a big string sound, and the sloping floor. The natural leakage between microphones would allow the room's character to come shining through.
John Wood and Pat Donaldson (standing) with singer-songwriter Allan Taylor (rear left) and drummer Dave Mattacks in the Sound Techniques control room."It did have a bit of an ambience to it. I think it made a difference, whereas most of the pop records of the era were done in much deader environments," says Livingston manager Jerry Boys, who moved to Sound Techniques as an engineer in 1968. "In a place like Sound Techniques or Livingston, you move your mics away and you get some space on it, so you can use that if you want to.
Even with close-miking, you'd think it wouldn't make a difference but it does!"
"With a medium-sized room that isn't too neutral, you can get a honk out of the room, which sometimes you like and sometimes you don't," says John Wood. "In a way, that one end of Sound Techniques, under the end opposite the control room — the low part of that coloured things, but it coloured them to your advantage, particularly the strings, which is why we got the string sound we got. You would never have expected to shove the strings in such a small area, but you could shove maybe 12 players in there and that space worked for you! It wouldn't work for you if you put a drum kit in there, because it would not be the right kind of coloration, but it did work really well for strings."
Just as the strings sounded great under the office, a band's rhythm section was almost always placed in the centre of the room under the high section of the ceiling, again using the particular idiosyncrasies of the old dairy to bring out the best in the sounds that ended up on tape.
Another factor in the unique sounds of many classic studios was their reverb, whether this came from echo chambers or echo plates. At Sound Techniques, John Wood used to spend a lot of time tweaking his EMT plates to perfection.
John Wood and Geoff Frost (right), 1978."They were certainly very nice plates," says Joe Boyd. "They certainly shaped my approach — I can't mix without an EMT now, really! Those plates were one of those mysteries that John looked after."
"We took a lot of trouble over them," says John Wood. "Again, studios are very much characterised by the sound of their reverb, or then they were, anyway. Empirically, echo plates were a bit eccentric because they would depend on how you set them up, they would depend on the weather, where they were — a hot or cold part of the building. Everybody had their own ways of messing about with these devices, and I spent a lot of time deciding how I wanted to use them at different ratios — you could put delay on them, and the sound would depend on what EQs you sent to them. You'd fiddle about with all the parameters, including the mechanical ones, until you got the sort of reverb that you wanted."
Bassist Rick Kemp was a regular player on Sound Techniques sessions.
Another vital ingredient in the great records made at the Chelsea studio was the quality of the musicians that were employed on the numerous sessions there, and this was no happy accident. Over the years, John Wood built up a close pool of musicians that he would regularly draft in for recording sessions, and tended to keep away from the usual suspects of the session-man circuit. If you take a look at the liner notes of LPs recorded at Sound Techniques during this period, you'll notice the same names cropping up again and again, including Dave Mattacks and Gerry Conway on drums, Danny Thompson, Dave Pegg and Pat Donaldson on bass, Richard Thompson, Jerry Donahue and Simon Nicol on guitars. These musicians knew each others' playing backwards, so when they turned up for a session, there was not only a great social cameraderie, there was also a musical telepathy. In this respect, you can draw likenesses to the house bands that US studios like Chess, Motown, Sun and Stax regularly used, helping to give their records their own unique sound. And just as with the great records produced in those great spaces, John's ethos was always to record as much as possible completely live. There was certainly no love lost between John Wood and the 'fixers' who still presided over many of the session men and women in the late '60s.
"We never used a fixer for a string section on the Nick Drake records," says John. "On his first record I rang the LSO, and I used to book all the strings that way. The others never sounded any good they'd be a lot of deadbeats who'd be out of the pit or whatever. The regular session musicians that you got in the '60s, or the early '60s anyway, were very jaded — they really were quite snooty, a lot of them, and so I never really got them in."
The atmosphere of Sound Techniques is something many of those who recorded there have talked about. It was laid-back and relaxed, with neither the clinical hospital-like feel of some studios, nor the indulgences of the rock-star lifestyle. The closest thing to luxury available was a couple of pints of ale at The Black Lion pub across the road.
One of the most famous Sound Techniques-built desks was the original Trident Studios console."There was absolutely no attempt to make it impressive or luxurious," Simon Nicol tells me. "It was functional. The concrete staircase and the galvanised hand rail could always have done with a lick of paint. It was clean, but in comparison to studios I came across later on, where some of the lobbies outdo five star-hotels — that was not the case with Sound Techniques. Function came above form, substance above style, and that was the ethos of the place. It was a very social business too — I suppose in other places you might have ploughed a natural division between the band and the staff, but when we did take a break to go to the pub, we all went out together! It was always just a very cool place to be."
"It was much funkier than places like CBS or Abbey Road, the bigger studios that people had spent lots of money on," says Dave Pegg, "but those studios never had very good ambiences as far as I was concerned. Sound Techniques was like coming home to us — and there was the cake shop next door and the pub opposite — I remember the pub opposite really well!"
"I can remember the feeling of the place," says Verity Adams, who worked at the studio in the '70s as Office Manager. "I just can remember the lovely atmosphere of the place, and that's what I think must have been partly responsible for the wonderful music that came out of the studio."
Above all, of course, the quality of those timeless Sound Techniques recordings also has to be credited to those that made it all happen: studio engineers Jerry Boys, Harry Davies, Victor Gamm and Roger Mayer, and of course, the two entrepreneurs who started it all, Geoff Frost and John Wood.
The Sound Techniques studio under the stewardship of John Wood and Geoff Frost came to a sad end in 1974 after the lease ran out. The existing landlords wanted to sell the building but Geoff and John could not raise the finance necessary to meet the (then) high valuation of £120,000 that had been put on the property, and were unable to find an alternative space that was both viable and affordable. This, combined with the fact that the pair could see that the record industry was entering a period of decline, led them to take the difficult decision to opt out. John Wood continued in the music industry, becoming a successful freelance engineer and producer, while Geoff Frost continued to use the Sound Techniques name to run a burgeoning software development house. The Chelsea studio freehold was bought by Olympic, who continued to run it as a going concern until the early '80s, when it was eventually sold off and converted into executive flats.
However, the magic of the place will always live on through the records it helped create, and there's little doubt that the musicians who had the good fortune to record at Sound Techniques during its decade-long heyday will always hold onto their fond memories.
"The '60s was a very different time, a very special time," remembers Robin Williamson of the Incredible String Band. "Especially in London, the whole city had an atmosphere and a magic about it a Peter Pan kind of Neverneverland. It was just very surreal, and Sound Techniques was very much a part of that."
At Levy's Sound studio, Geoff Frost had designed and built a raft of equipment and, aside from engineering sessions, had developed the technical skills and understanding that would enable him to design and build mixing desks not only for Sound Techniques but for studios across the world. Again, there was no grand design to move into equipment manufacturing:
John and Geoff simply did not have the finance to purchase a desk from anyone else in 1964.
The Sound Techniques team take their System 12 for a seaside outing."We never started out to manufacture mixers for anyone other than ourselves," laughs Geoff. "It came as a bit of a surprise when people saw the first desk at Chelsea and said, 'Cor, this sounds great, can you make one for us?'"
The desks that Geoff designed for Sound Techniques would also help characterise the sound of the records made at Chelsea and, of course, later on at the other studios they supplied.
Trident and De Lane Lea (at both Kingsway and Wembley) bought a succession of Sound Techniques mixers over the years, as did Sunset Sound and Elektra Studios in California. Initially, these desks were made in the little office in the studio above where the string sections used to be placed.
"We were making mixers up there," says John, "And as soon as the red light went on, it meant stop drilling and hacking about and hammering, and there were two or three people working up there!"
The Mildenhall factory unit where the Sound Techniques System 12 desk was assembled. The biggest manufacturing success came in 1969 when Geoff and John collaborated to design and build the System 12, arguably the world's first compact mixing console. Forty or so of these desks were sold, and effectively mass-produced at a small factory in Mildenhall, Suffolk. The idea for the System 12 came during a brief beverage stop on the A1.
"It must have been about '69, and I remember John Wood and I were sitting in a very early forerunner of the Little Chef in Hatfield coming back to Suffolk from London," recalls Geoff.
"It was pissing down with rain, we were fed up, so we went in for a cup of tea, and I was moaning about the fact that every time we made a mixer, it was me who had to go and install it and lie on my back with hot solder falling in my face. So we were talking about this, and also about the fact we felt that the potential market for the A-range was becoming largely saturated, so I said 'I think we should build a smaller desk that we can virtually mass-produce as a complete unit. It could have a patchbay in it, and after it leaves the factory and it gets to the studio, all they need to do is plug their mics in!' I remember John having to continuously go up to the waitress to get more napkins, which he used to sketch out his ideas and functionality, and I used to sketch out my ideas for the circuitry. By the Monday morning I had the drawings for a prototype!"
Sound Techniques equipment and modules are now extremely scarce, and when they are discovered they change hands for vast sums of money. The technical secrets that Geoff implanted into each mic amp and circuit board have helped secure Sound Techniques gear a reputation for being some of the finest ever made.
John Wood in the Sound Techniques control room, you're a fan of British '60s and '70s music, particularly psychedelic folk and folk-rock, you'll no doubt be familiar with a little tagline gracing the liner notes of some of your favourite records: "Recorded at Sound Techniques, Chelsea". John Cale, Nick Drake, Fairport Convention, Incredible String Band, Jethro Tull, John Martyn, Pentangle, Pink Floyd, Richard Thompson, Sandy Denny and Steeleye Span were just a few of the luminaries to grace this unassuming but hugely important English recording studio.
The early '60s was a time when the majority of studios in London had a reputation for being stuffy and oppressive: manned and administered by scientists in brown lab coats, who had little interest in the 'nasty' guitar music that had so rudely thrust itself upon them. But by the middle of the decade, these studios' dominance was being eroded by a handful of hip new young independents, bristling with young, enthusiastic engineers and producers with as much passion for popular music as the musicians they were recording. By the end of the '60s, Sound Techniques had firmly established itself as one of London's finest studios, drawing in anyone who cared about the quality of their recordings. Just take a listen to Nick Drake's Bryter Later or Judy Collins' In My Life and you'll know exactly what we're talking about when we refer to the unique 'Sound Techniques sound'.
Sound Techniques was the brainchild of Geoff Frost and John Wood, who in mid-1964 were both working at Levy's Sound Studio in New Bond Street, a very busy 'jobbing' studio where they spent much of their time producing 'copycat' versions of current hits for Woolworths' budget Embassy label, as well as laying down tracks for proprietor Morris Levy's own Oriole label. Geoff had been Chief Engineer at the studios since 1959, while John had joined the technical staff in '62. Their decision to start their own venture was partly due to the fact that they wanted to be their own bosses and partly because Morris Levy had just sold out to US giant CBS records, leaving the pair with some uncertainty about their future employment.
As was often the case with the music industry in the '60s, there was no grand design or meticulous planning involved in their decision.
"We decided we'd start a recording studio," John Wood tells me, "and with that wonderful ignorance-is-bliss mentality and impetuousness of youth, we thought we'd just get on and do it and do a better job than Levy's so Geoff left in the September of 1964 and started looking for premises, and that was it!"
The variety of different skills that Geoff, then 28, and John, 24, brought to the table helped ensure that Sound Techniques had an excellent grounding for future success. In his role as Chief Engineer at Levy's, Geoff had taken the lead technical role building and maintaining the equipment in addition to engineering sessions. John, meanwhile, had previously plied his trade in the cutting room of Decca Records prior to his move to Levy's, training his acute ear through many hours working with their classical catalogue.
The finance for the venture came via Geoff's savings and a loan from Barclays Bank, and the company was duly registered at Companies House in December 1964, after a name had been decided upon during a swift but inspired telephone conversation between the two entrepreneurs.
"Geoff rang me up from Peter Godfrey's office, who was our solicitor, saying, 'We've got to have a name for the company!'," laughs John, "and I'm sitting in the control room at Levy's, and there's a Pultec on the rack and an Altec compressor and I see Pulse Techniques underneath Pultec so I said, 'Well, what about Sotec or Sound Techniques?' and that's literally where our name came from. And it was a great name! The biggest mistake we made was not registering it across the world!"
As far as the studio premises go, Geoff and John already knew the kind of thing they should be looking for following Geoff's visit to the United States in '64.
"I got on a plane to Nashville to look at the American studios, to find out why they got so much better sounds than the English studios," Geoff tells me. "There was an incredible difference in the sound. American stuff was open, it was loud — the stuff from British studios was very sort of twee and dull. The sound coming out of America, particularly from Bradley's, really impressed me personally. So the first thing I did when we got off the plane was, after finding a hotel, I knocked on Bradley's door and said, 'I'm a chief engineer from London, is it possible for your chief engineer to show me round?' and they said, 'Well, of course!' And Bradley's was by the far the most impressive studio I saw and just the kind of studio that John and I wanted to build. It wasn't full of deadening materials like English studios were — with English studios the idea was to make everything as dead as possible, but Bradley's just had a very minimal acoustic treatment with a very high ceiling. They also had very minimal equipment. In order to make the English sound more and more American, English studios were buying up more and more equipment. But Bradley's had a very simple desk — I think it was an ex-broadcast desk, a Bendix or a Gates or something like that, and they had outboard EQs — they had Langevins, and all the Langevins were locked in at 3k 8dB boost position and left there!"
These deceptively straightforward lessons would be an important influence on the Sound Techniques story.
After months of trawling estate agents and trudging the streets of the capital, Geoff finally found a building with some potential. Situated near to Chelsea's King's Road and hiding down the end of a small alley, 46a Old Church Street was part of an early 19th-century dairy. Part of the ground floor belonged to a pottery, while the other part of the ground floor and the first and second floors were both available to lease. The deal Geoff and John negotiated included a clause giving them permission to remove part of the second floor to give them the height they required to get a 'Bradley's type sound'. A team of Polish builders was duly set to work to knock out the middle section, leaving the left and right sections in situ to be developed into the control room and an office respectively, both of which would be accessed by separate staircases leading from the live room. An eighth of an inch of asphalt was laid on the floor to dampen the sound to an extent — another Nashville tip — then covered with carpet, although the original gradual slope from the dairy days was left as it was, possibly contributing to the room's sound once they commenced recording. The time now came for a minimal amount of acoustic treatment.
"We cleaned the place up, put double glazing in where it was convenient to, where it wasn't convenient we didn't bother," says Geoff. "As far as acoustics go, John and I went around clapping our hands, and we'd say, 'Ooh, we need something up there!' but bearing in mind we were so short of money, we did as little as possible! Underneath the office, we left the old-fashioned lath-and-plaster ceiling, which did great things for strings."
The first mixer to bear the Sound Techniques name was custom-built by Geoff Frost and John Wood, and sold in order to fund the building of a desk for the studio the construction work had been completed, it was time to build the first Sound Techniques mixing desk. At this point, John Wood also left Levy's, and he and Geoff spent the next few months building the mixer in the middle of the studio's live room (see 'Sound Techniques Consoles' box). With regard to other equipment, John and Geoff were again limited by their rapidly disappearing budget, so they opted to build as much as they could themselves. They could not afford complete Ampex tape machines, so they managed to negotiate a deal in which they bought just the decks, leaving Geoff to build the electronics for three machines — one two-track, one four-track and one mono — which they housed in second-hand consoles purchased at the BBC's redundant equipment stores in Chiswick. Geoff also built four monitor speakers using a design from electronics bible the Audio Encyclopaedia and housed them in a single cabinet to "make things more rigid". The monitor speakers would change progressively as the studio's fortunes improved, and in 1968, as more 'rocky' artistes began to filter through the doors, the studio underwent a revamp, including the installation of an eight-channel desk designed by Geoff and more sophisticated acoustic treatments to make things a little less 'live'.
However, John and Geoff did splash some cash on an EMI limiter, a couple of Altec compressors and a slew of top-quality microphones including Neumann 67s, KM56s, KM54s, AKG D19s and an RCA ribbon. The studio would later move to 16-track and ultimately 24-track by the mid-'70s, and other later purchases included Neumann U47 microphones and Fairchild 660 limiters.
As far as reverb was concerned, John's preference was to buy an EMT plate but their funds had almost run dry, so the pair opted to use what little spare space they had to build an acoustic echo chamber by the front door out of a pre-fab garage kit of parts. But aside from the fact that it was a very small space, it also filled with water whenever it rained heavily so, not surprisingly, as soon as they could afford it they bought their first EMT.
Happy with how the studio was sounding after a few demo sessions, the two men decided that it was time to open for business — but London's music-biz fraternity was not exactly beating the doors down in anticipation.
"We put one advert in Kemp's music directory, which cost a bloody fortune, but we never had a single enquiry!" recalls Geoff. "We were sitting around waiting for the phone to ring for weeks and it didn't ring. In the end, I think we were about three days away from going bankrupt and the phone rang, and it was Frank Barber, who did all John Schroeder's arrangements at Levy's. He said, 'I've got a client who's looking for a studio. He wants to book it for four days a week for about four months and I can't find anywhere where we can get in!' so I said to Frank, 'All right Frank, just let me look at the diary!', and I did actually get the diary out and looked at all these blank pages — and I said, 'Well, Frank, I think we can probably move things around a little!'"
The client turned out to be prolific classical soundtrack composer Phil Green, who had been contracted by 3M to produce around a staggering 2000 tracks of soft orchestral 'elevator music' that they were planning to market with a new cassette-based system they had developed for retail outlets and hotels. Sound Techniques got the gig, and John and Geoff were left thanking the gods, although the first day's recording didn't go quite as planned.
A plan view of the layout of Sound Techniques. The control room and workshop were upstairs, leaving the central part of the live area with a high ceiling. "The interesting thing was that we'd always thought that we would put the strings in the middle of the room, where we had twice the ceiling height, and that they would sound good there," says John, "and we thought we'd put the rhythm section at the end under the office. On what must have been the first day of the Phil Green sessions, we put the strings in the middle, the rhythm under the office and I think we probably had brass as well under the control room — and it just didn't work. They complained they couldn't hear, they couldn't hear the rhythm and they couldn't hear this so we had to change the whole thing round and we ended up with the rhythm in the middle, the brass one end, and the strings under the office — and it worked fine!
Afterwards, that became our standard setup and the interesting thing was that the low end of the studio, where we would put the string section, had a sort of natural resonance around 500-700 Hz or something, and you would get this really big string sound from a small section. That was one of the things that I suppose we were quite lucky with or famed for in latter years the string sounds on the Nick Drake records people are always going on about!"
The Phil Green sessions proved to be a turning point for Sound Techniques Ltd and the work began to trickle in, largely because potential clients were so impressed by the tapes they heard. By this time, the company had also received orders from other studios for mixing desks, so Geoff immersed himself in console manufacturing in the upstairs office-cum-workshop while John settled into the role he would fill until the mid-'70s: Sound Techniques Studio Manager.
The original Sound Techniques 'Chelsea' mixer built by Frost and Wood, in the control even more significant turning point came when Elektra Records began booking time at the studio. Sound Techniques was recommended to the US label by mutual friend and EMI engineer Malcolm Addey. The first Elektra recordings to be made at Sound Techniques were two orchestral concept albums based around the signs of the zodiac and the sea, which John engineered with producer Mort Gamson. Elektra had decided to record in England for the same reason that 3M had opted to with their 'elevator music': British string players were both cheaper and of a higher quality than their American contemporaries. At the end of one of these sessions, the musicians needed paying, so Elektra head honcho Jac Holzman instructed his UK Office Manager to go down to Chelsea loaded with the lucre. The manager's name was Joe Boyd.
It would be the records that Joe worked on with John Wood for both Elektra and, later on, Joe's Witchseason Productions company that would first expose the Sound Techniques sound to the music-listening masses. Wood and Boyd immediately hit it off during Joe's first visit in early 1966. The early projects they worked on together were quickly recorded, straight-to-master-tape recordings of artists such as Alisdair Clayre, Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick, and the first Incredible String Band album. It would be during the recording of this latter record that the two became very close, and their relationship both in the live room and the control room would later bring the best out of Sandy Denny, Nick Drake, Fairport Convention, Pink Floyd and Richard Thompson, to name but a few. The way they worked was in no way your typical engineer/producer relationship — they worked in partnership.
"In some ways, some people found it a curious relationship, but for me it's the way I like to work with anybody, really," explains Joe Boyd. "I get nervous if I feel people are pulling their punches around me — you know, if someone disagrees with what I want to do, I want to hear about it and then at least I can make up my own mind. I want as much information as I can get, and John is very gruff and ready to speak his mind. He never suffer fools gladly and he's never shy of voicing an opinion. I find that a very good way to work because I want to know what he thinks of everything I'm doing — sometimes I had ideas that worked OK on paper but didn't in reality, and he'd sober me up when I was getting carried away with what the possibilities were, because John was always looking ahead to the mix and what would actually work."
There is a distinctively rich, colourful sound and style that filters through not just the Joe Boyd records but many other Sound Techniques recordings, to the extent that people have referred to it as the John Wood sound or the Sound Techniques sound. As with all the great studios in the era before excessive multitracking, the individual facets of a particular room gave each studio a unique sound, and the Sound Techniques live room certainly contributed to the great sounds it produced, with the high ceiling in the middle, the space under the office on the right-hand side that gave such a big string sound, and the sloping floor. The natural leakage between microphones would allow the room's character to come shining through.
John Wood and Pat Donaldson (standing) with singer-songwriter Allan Taylor (rear left) and drummer Dave Mattacks in the Sound Techniques control room."It did have a bit of an ambience to it. I think it made a difference, whereas most of the pop records of the era were done in much deader environments," says Livingston manager Jerry Boys, who moved to Sound Techniques as an engineer in 1968. "In a place like Sound Techniques or Livingston, you move your mics away and you get some space on it, so you can use that if you want to.
Even with close-miking, you'd think it wouldn't make a difference but it does!"
"With a medium-sized room that isn't too neutral, you can get a honk out of the room, which sometimes you like and sometimes you don't," says John Wood. "In a way, that one end of Sound Techniques, under the end opposite the control room — the low part of that coloured things, but it coloured them to your advantage, particularly the strings, which is why we got the string sound we got. You would never have expected to shove the strings in such a small area, but you could shove maybe 12 players in there and that space worked for you! It wouldn't work for you if you put a drum kit in there, because it would not be the right kind of coloration, but it did work really well for strings."
Just as the strings sounded great under the office, a band's rhythm section was almost always placed in the centre of the room under the high section of the ceiling, again using the particular idiosyncrasies of the old dairy to bring out the best in the sounds that ended up on tape.
Another factor in the unique sounds of many classic studios was their reverb, whether this came from echo chambers or echo plates. At Sound Techniques, John Wood used to spend a lot of time tweaking his EMT plates to perfection.
John Wood and Geoff Frost (right), 1978."They were certainly very nice plates," says Joe Boyd. "They certainly shaped my approach — I can't mix without an EMT now, really! Those plates were one of those mysteries that John looked after."
"We took a lot of trouble over them," says John Wood. "Again, studios are very much characterised by the sound of their reverb, or then they were, anyway. Empirically, echo plates were a bit eccentric because they would depend on how you set them up, they would depend on the weather, where they were — a hot or cold part of the building. Everybody had their own ways of messing about with these devices, and I spent a lot of time deciding how I wanted to use them at different ratios — you could put delay on them, and the sound would depend on what EQs you sent to them. You'd fiddle about with all the parameters, including the mechanical ones, until you got the sort of reverb that you wanted."
Bassist Rick Kemp was a regular player on Sound Techniques sessions.
Another vital ingredient in the great records made at the Chelsea studio was the quality of the musicians that were employed on the numerous sessions there, and this was no happy accident. Over the years, John Wood built up a close pool of musicians that he would regularly draft in for recording sessions, and tended to keep away from the usual suspects of the session-man circuit. If you take a look at the liner notes of LPs recorded at Sound Techniques during this period, you'll notice the same names cropping up again and again, including Dave Mattacks and Gerry Conway on drums, Danny Thompson, Dave Pegg and Pat Donaldson on bass, Richard Thompson, Jerry Donahue and Simon Nicol on guitars. These musicians knew each others' playing backwards, so when they turned up for a session, there was not only a great social cameraderie, there was also a musical telepathy. In this respect, you can draw likenesses to the house bands that US studios like Chess, Motown, Sun and Stax regularly used, helping to give their records their own unique sound. And just as with the great records produced in those great spaces, John's ethos was always to record as much as possible completely live. There was certainly no love lost between John Wood and the 'fixers' who still presided over many of the session men and women in the late '60s.
"We never used a fixer for a string section on the Nick Drake records," says John. "On his first record I rang the LSO, and I used to book all the strings that way. The others never sounded any good they'd be a lot of deadbeats who'd be out of the pit or whatever. The regular session musicians that you got in the '60s, or the early '60s anyway, were very jaded — they really were quite snooty, a lot of them, and so I never really got them in."
The atmosphere of Sound Techniques is something many of those who recorded there have talked about. It was laid-back and relaxed, with neither the clinical hospital-like feel of some studios, nor the indulgences of the rock-star lifestyle. The closest thing to luxury available was a couple of pints of ale at The Black Lion pub across the road.
One of the most famous Sound Techniques-built desks was the original Trident Studios console."There was absolutely no attempt to make it impressive or luxurious," Simon Nicol tells me. "It was functional. The concrete staircase and the galvanised hand rail could always have done with a lick of paint. It was clean, but in comparison to studios I came across later on, where some of the lobbies outdo five star-hotels — that was not the case with Sound Techniques. Function came above form, substance above style, and that was the ethos of the place. It was a very social business too — I suppose in other places you might have ploughed a natural division between the band and the staff, but when we did take a break to go to the pub, we all went out together! It was always just a very cool place to be."
"It was much funkier than places like CBS or Abbey Road, the bigger studios that people had spent lots of money on," says Dave Pegg, "but those studios never had very good ambiences as far as I was concerned. Sound Techniques was like coming home to us — and there was the cake shop next door and the pub opposite — I remember the pub opposite really well!"
"I can remember the feeling of the place," says Verity Adams, who worked at the studio in the '70s as Office Manager. "I just can remember the lovely atmosphere of the place, and that's what I think must have been partly responsible for the wonderful music that came out of the studio."
Above all, of course, the quality of those timeless Sound Techniques recordings also has to be credited to those that made it all happen: studio engineers Jerry Boys, Harry Davies, Victor Gamm and Roger Mayer, and of course, the two entrepreneurs who started it all, Geoff Frost and John Wood.
The Sound Techniques studio under the stewardship of John Wood and Geoff Frost came to a sad end in 1974 after the lease ran out. The existing landlords wanted to sell the building but Geoff and John could not raise the finance necessary to meet the (then) high valuation of £120,000 that had been put on the property, and were unable to find an alternative space that was both viable and affordable. This, combined with the fact that the pair could see that the record industry was entering a period of decline, led them to take the difficult decision to opt out. John Wood continued in the music industry, becoming a successful freelance engineer and producer, while Geoff Frost continued to use the Sound Techniques name to run a burgeoning software development house. The Chelsea studio freehold was bought by Olympic, who continued to run it as a going concern until the early '80s, when it was eventually sold off and converted into executive flats.
However, the magic of the place will always live on through the records it helped create, and there's little doubt that the musicians who had the good fortune to record at Sound Techniques during its decade-long heyday will always hold onto their fond memories.
"The '60s was a very different time, a very special time," remembers Robin Williamson of the Incredible String Band. "Especially in London, the whole city had an atmosphere and a magic about it a Peter Pan kind of Neverneverland. It was just very surreal, and Sound Techniques was very much a part of that."
At Levy's Sound studio, Geoff Frost had designed and built a raft of equipment and, aside from engineering sessions, had developed the technical skills and understanding that would enable him to design and build mixing desks not only for Sound Techniques but for studios across the world. Again, there was no grand design to move into equipment manufacturing:
John and Geoff simply did not have the finance to purchase a desk from anyone else in 1964.
The Sound Techniques team take their System 12 for a seaside outing."We never started out to manufacture mixers for anyone other than ourselves," laughs Geoff. "It came as a bit of a surprise when people saw the first desk at Chelsea and said, 'Cor, this sounds great, can you make one for us?'"
The desks that Geoff designed for Sound Techniques would also help characterise the sound of the records made at Chelsea and, of course, later on at the other studios they supplied.
Trident and De Lane Lea (at both Kingsway and Wembley) bought a succession of Sound Techniques mixers over the years, as did Sunset Sound and Elektra Studios in California. Initially, these desks were made in the little office in the studio above where the string sections used to be placed.
"We were making mixers up there," says John, "And as soon as the red light went on, it meant stop drilling and hacking about and hammering, and there were two or three people working up there!"
The Mildenhall factory unit where the Sound Techniques System 12 desk was assembled. The biggest manufacturing success came in 1969 when Geoff and John collaborated to design and build the System 12, arguably the world's first compact mixing console. Forty or so of these desks were sold, and effectively mass-produced at a small factory in Mildenhall, Suffolk. The idea for the System 12 came during a brief beverage stop on the A1.
"It must have been about '69, and I remember John Wood and I were sitting in a very early forerunner of the Little Chef in Hatfield coming back to Suffolk from London," recalls Geoff.
"It was pissing down with rain, we were fed up, so we went in for a cup of tea, and I was moaning about the fact that every time we made a mixer, it was me who had to go and install it and lie on my back with hot solder falling in my face. So we were talking about this, and also about the fact we felt that the potential market for the A-range was becoming largely saturated, so I said 'I think we should build a smaller desk that we can virtually mass-produce as a complete unit. It could have a patchbay in it, and after it leaves the factory and it gets to the studio, all they need to do is plug their mics in!' I remember John having to continuously go up to the waitress to get more napkins, which he used to sketch out his ideas and functionality, and I used to sketch out my ideas for the circuitry. By the Monday morning I had the drawings for a prototype!"
Sound Techniques equipment and modules are now extremely scarce, and when they are discovered they change hands for vast sums of money. The technical secrets that Geoff implanted into each mic amp and circuit board have helped secure Sound Techniques gear a reputation for being some of the finest ever made.
Friday 13 January 2017
10 Tips For Nailing Your Vocals In The Studio
By Jeannie Deva
Vocal recording is an art unto itself. Singing in a studio--surrounded by sound equipment, with no audience hearing you--is quite different from stage performance. The following expert tips are a distillation of over 20 years of the author's experience as a recording studio vocal specialist.
1. Get Hold of a Rough Mix. Most musicians can't afford to waste recording studio time. If you want your recording to turn some heads and get you noticed, don't rush into the studio before you're ready. If the instrumental tracks are recorded days before the vocal recording begins, get a rough mix to practice with during preproduction.
2. Have a Grip on General Vocal Technique. Your vocal technique should be good enough for you to expressively sing your songs on-pitch with good tone and stamina without straining or blowing out. If you can't do that, you'll waste time in the studio with endless takes and lots of auto-tuning. Before going in the studio, establish the right key, know the melody and lyrics, smooth out pitch and range difficulties and lock in the rhythm.
3. Focus on the Message and Emotion. Once the technical details are covered, focus on the message and emotion(s) of the song. Your phrasing decisions relate to emotion and message and should be believable within the feel and style of the music. Your own unique style comes from making the lyrics your communication. Mean what you say when you sing.
4. Imagine an Audience. Your voice must reach through this electronic recording to emotionally affect the eventual listener. Sing in the studio with the same energy and believability of a live performance. Even though you may be in a small vocal booth, don't sing to yourself or to mental pictures of past audiences. Imagine someone or an audience out in front of your microphone in the here and now and sing to them with vitality and feeling.
5. Be Well Rested. If your vocal session is scheduled when you're tired and you're pushing past fatigue, you risk strain, blow-out and a general poor result. Some studios offer reduced rates for recording late at night. If you're trying to save money that way, take a nap and arrive once the rhythm section is recorded. You need to be at your physical best for your voice to respond well.
6. Get The Right Mic. Your voice is unique and so is each microphone. Match the personality of the mic to your voice. If possible, test the vocal mics prior to booking the studio. If they don't have one you're happy with go elsewhere or bring your own mic. You may unwittingly alter the way you sing if a microphone mismatch distorts the basic qualities of your voice. The complications are too numerous to list.
7. Adjust the Headset Mix: Headset mix makes a big difference in how you sing and perform. You can change volume levels of instruments, other voices, effects—like reverb—or eliminate them altogether. Adjust it at the beginning of the session until you can perform undistracted. It doesn't matter if you sound good to the engineer and what you hear in the headset is not what is being recorded. If needed, sing with one ear off.” You'll get similar complications to a mic mismatch when not comfortable with your headset mix.
8. Be Careful When Punching-in.” When re-recording a single line or word (called punching-in”), sing along with the earlier line or section and then continue singing past it. This maintains smoothness of phrasing and helps the engineer pick the best punch-in point. Part of recording studio technique is maintaining a constant distance between your mouth and the mic even if you move your body and especially during punch-ins.
9. Focus on Vowels vs. Consonants. Pops and hisses on a track created by overemphasis of consonants can spoil the recording. Think of the consonant as using the same amount of air as its neighboring vowel. Focus your energy on vowel sounds and let the consonants take a secondary role. Vowels are the sounds of your voice, not consonants.
10. Evaluate Your Tracks. Knowing what to look for in evaluating your tracks and how to fix errors makes the difference between a good or great recording.
Rhythm and Phrasing: Are there any places where the phrases go off rhythmically from the music or sound rushed? Consistent phrasing that is appropriate for the style sells” the song and helps you touch your audience.
Pitch: Are any words sung off-pitch? If you were able to sing on-pitch outside the studio possible reasons for pitch problems during recording can be incorrect headset mix or the wrong mic or its placement. The relative volume of your voice to the other instruments can hinder your pitch awareness. A wrong type of reverb or having too much of it, can confuse you by pulling your attention to the reflection of your voice rather than your primary sound.
Vocal Tone: In the context of this song and style, does the voice sound too choked, strained, or weak for pro standards? Sometimes too much compression on the vocal during recording can make a singer push and strain. If you've recorded the song in sections or line by line, ensure your vocal tone matches throughout the song. Variance of mic to mouth distance can result in unwanted tonal changes.
Overall Performance: Does the song sound alive? Do you believe the singer? Does it move you or leave you feeling untouched? There is a balance between achieving a great performance versus having technical details to correct. Once you have a great performance, fix anything that would distract the listener. Your objective: Recording a performance that keeps the listener immersed in the song.
© Copyrighted and reprinted by permission of Music Connection Magazine.
Vocal recording is an art unto itself. Singing in a studio--surrounded by sound equipment, with no audience hearing you--is quite different from stage performance. The following expert tips are a distillation of over 20 years of the author's experience as a recording studio vocal specialist.
1. Get Hold of a Rough Mix. Most musicians can't afford to waste recording studio time. If you want your recording to turn some heads and get you noticed, don't rush into the studio before you're ready. If the instrumental tracks are recorded days before the vocal recording begins, get a rough mix to practice with during preproduction.
2. Have a Grip on General Vocal Technique. Your vocal technique should be good enough for you to expressively sing your songs on-pitch with good tone and stamina without straining or blowing out. If you can't do that, you'll waste time in the studio with endless takes and lots of auto-tuning. Before going in the studio, establish the right key, know the melody and lyrics, smooth out pitch and range difficulties and lock in the rhythm.
3. Focus on the Message and Emotion. Once the technical details are covered, focus on the message and emotion(s) of the song. Your phrasing decisions relate to emotion and message and should be believable within the feel and style of the music. Your own unique style comes from making the lyrics your communication. Mean what you say when you sing.
4. Imagine an Audience. Your voice must reach through this electronic recording to emotionally affect the eventual listener. Sing in the studio with the same energy and believability of a live performance. Even though you may be in a small vocal booth, don't sing to yourself or to mental pictures of past audiences. Imagine someone or an audience out in front of your microphone in the here and now and sing to them with vitality and feeling.
5. Be Well Rested. If your vocal session is scheduled when you're tired and you're pushing past fatigue, you risk strain, blow-out and a general poor result. Some studios offer reduced rates for recording late at night. If you're trying to save money that way, take a nap and arrive once the rhythm section is recorded. You need to be at your physical best for your voice to respond well.
6. Get The Right Mic. Your voice is unique and so is each microphone. Match the personality of the mic to your voice. If possible, test the vocal mics prior to booking the studio. If they don't have one you're happy with go elsewhere or bring your own mic. You may unwittingly alter the way you sing if a microphone mismatch distorts the basic qualities of your voice. The complications are too numerous to list.
7. Adjust the Headset Mix: Headset mix makes a big difference in how you sing and perform. You can change volume levels of instruments, other voices, effects—like reverb—or eliminate them altogether. Adjust it at the beginning of the session until you can perform undistracted. It doesn't matter if you sound good to the engineer and what you hear in the headset is not what is being recorded. If needed, sing with one ear off.” You'll get similar complications to a mic mismatch when not comfortable with your headset mix.
8. Be Careful When Punching-in.” When re-recording a single line or word (called punching-in”), sing along with the earlier line or section and then continue singing past it. This maintains smoothness of phrasing and helps the engineer pick the best punch-in point. Part of recording studio technique is maintaining a constant distance between your mouth and the mic even if you move your body and especially during punch-ins.
9. Focus on Vowels vs. Consonants. Pops and hisses on a track created by overemphasis of consonants can spoil the recording. Think of the consonant as using the same amount of air as its neighboring vowel. Focus your energy on vowel sounds and let the consonants take a secondary role. Vowels are the sounds of your voice, not consonants.
10. Evaluate Your Tracks. Knowing what to look for in evaluating your tracks and how to fix errors makes the difference between a good or great recording.
Rhythm and Phrasing: Are there any places where the phrases go off rhythmically from the music or sound rushed? Consistent phrasing that is appropriate for the style sells” the song and helps you touch your audience.
Pitch: Are any words sung off-pitch? If you were able to sing on-pitch outside the studio possible reasons for pitch problems during recording can be incorrect headset mix or the wrong mic or its placement. The relative volume of your voice to the other instruments can hinder your pitch awareness. A wrong type of reverb or having too much of it, can confuse you by pulling your attention to the reflection of your voice rather than your primary sound.
Vocal Tone: In the context of this song and style, does the voice sound too choked, strained, or weak for pro standards? Sometimes too much compression on the vocal during recording can make a singer push and strain. If you've recorded the song in sections or line by line, ensure your vocal tone matches throughout the song. Variance of mic to mouth distance can result in unwanted tonal changes.
Overall Performance: Does the song sound alive? Do you believe the singer? Does it move you or leave you feeling untouched? There is a balance between achieving a great performance versus having technical details to correct. Once you have a great performance, fix anything that would distract the listener. Your objective: Recording a performance that keeps the listener immersed in the song.
© Copyrighted and reprinted by permission of Music Connection Magazine.
Tuesday 10 January 2017
10 Top Tips For Voiceover Recording Success
Randy Coppinger
If you are a singer, voice actor, producer or, recording engineer, here are ten items worth considering for an effective voice recording session.
Tart Green Apple
This is a common remedy for sticky, clicky mouth noise. The tartness gets the mouth wet. You don't have to eat the whole thing, just a little bite as needed during the session. There are many other remedies (that don't go bad as quickly). So, bring a tart apple or find something else that tames the mouth noise.
Comfortable Headphones
I really hate listening on headphones for long periods of time. I sympathize with performers who may be working in them for hours. Make sure the cans are comfy. Otherwise they will become a distraction, fatiguing wearers instead of helping the session run smoothly.
Dress In Layers
Studios try so hard to get air comfortable and quiet. But even the best built system can be too warm or cold for someone. Worse, the temp may rise and fall uncomfortably. Wear a few thin layers — nothing starched, because it's noisy — to get comfortable again quickly.
Popper Stopper
These don't stop plosives completely, but can keep them tame.
Low Rolloff
It shocked me when I finally discovered that this is the secret to minimizing 90% of p-pops. Roll off the bottom at around 100Hz (18dB/octave slope) before the compressor, and have the aforementioned popper stopper. Then, only the most plosive blowhards will p-pop. Well, mic position matters a little too.
Analog Compressor
I don't believe analog tape sounds inherently better. But I do think that people who know how to record to it also condition their signal before they hit the tape. I think that if you present an AD analog-to-digital converter with a great signal, you give it a better chance of translating the audio. Almost all voice recording benefits from compression, so I like to put a touch on before the AD converter just like professionals did in ye olden times.
Analog Fader
Most people drop their volume at the end of a phrase or sentence. It's a natural thing to do before a pause, especially as air gets used up. It's not difficult to anticipate the end of a sentence, providing the opportunity to raise the volume a little at those quieter moments. And if someone is performing more than one take in a row, patterns develop, providing additional opportunities to reach for the quiet moments and pull back on the loud stuff. Sure, you can do that after the AD, but I think you give the converter a better signal if you do some of that up front.
Two Great Microphones
Most if not all of the voice recording will be the first mic, probably closer to the performer. But if you put a second mic a bit behind the first one and record it 12dB or lower than the first one, you just bought yourself some distortion insurance. Now don't use them both at the same time, but back and forth as necessary. If things go well, you will never need the second mic. Like the fire department.
Packing Blankets
If there are unwanted reflections in the mic, something is rattling, or it's deathly cold, nothing is as handy as a packing blanket. They're especially useful for location recording, acoustically untreated spaces and multi-use rooms.
Fully Accessorized Music/Script Stand
I prefer to use two stand lights for better coverage. A piece of carpet covering the stand helps reduce reflections back into the mic, and reduce vibrations. Always have writing utensils (pencils erase!).
Many people tend to drop their head away from the mic as they read down the page. A large paper clamp at the top of the stand helps keep eyes looking up, which can raise the head overall and even be used to hold a folded piece of paper after you're done with the top portion.
If you are a singer, voice actor, producer or, recording engineer, here are ten items worth considering for an effective voice recording session.
Tart Green Apple
This is a common remedy for sticky, clicky mouth noise. The tartness gets the mouth wet. You don't have to eat the whole thing, just a little bite as needed during the session. There are many other remedies (that don't go bad as quickly). So, bring a tart apple or find something else that tames the mouth noise.
Comfortable Headphones
I really hate listening on headphones for long periods of time. I sympathize with performers who may be working in them for hours. Make sure the cans are comfy. Otherwise they will become a distraction, fatiguing wearers instead of helping the session run smoothly.
Dress In Layers
Studios try so hard to get air comfortable and quiet. But even the best built system can be too warm or cold for someone. Worse, the temp may rise and fall uncomfortably. Wear a few thin layers — nothing starched, because it's noisy — to get comfortable again quickly.
Popper Stopper
These don't stop plosives completely, but can keep them tame.
Low Rolloff
It shocked me when I finally discovered that this is the secret to minimizing 90% of p-pops. Roll off the bottom at around 100Hz (18dB/octave slope) before the compressor, and have the aforementioned popper stopper. Then, only the most plosive blowhards will p-pop. Well, mic position matters a little too.
Analog Compressor
I don't believe analog tape sounds inherently better. But I do think that people who know how to record to it also condition their signal before they hit the tape. I think that if you present an AD analog-to-digital converter with a great signal, you give it a better chance of translating the audio. Almost all voice recording benefits from compression, so I like to put a touch on before the AD converter just like professionals did in ye olden times.
Analog Fader
Most people drop their volume at the end of a phrase or sentence. It's a natural thing to do before a pause, especially as air gets used up. It's not difficult to anticipate the end of a sentence, providing the opportunity to raise the volume a little at those quieter moments. And if someone is performing more than one take in a row, patterns develop, providing additional opportunities to reach for the quiet moments and pull back on the loud stuff. Sure, you can do that after the AD, but I think you give the converter a better signal if you do some of that up front.
Two Great Microphones
Most if not all of the voice recording will be the first mic, probably closer to the performer. But if you put a second mic a bit behind the first one and record it 12dB or lower than the first one, you just bought yourself some distortion insurance. Now don't use them both at the same time, but back and forth as necessary. If things go well, you will never need the second mic. Like the fire department.
Packing Blankets
If there are unwanted reflections in the mic, something is rattling, or it's deathly cold, nothing is as handy as a packing blanket. They're especially useful for location recording, acoustically untreated spaces and multi-use rooms.
Fully Accessorized Music/Script Stand
I prefer to use two stand lights for better coverage. A piece of carpet covering the stand helps reduce reflections back into the mic, and reduce vibrations. Always have writing utensils (pencils erase!).
Many people tend to drop their head away from the mic as they read down the page. A large paper clamp at the top of the stand helps keep eyes looking up, which can raise the head overall and even be used to hold a folded piece of paper after you're done with the top portion.
Friday 6 January 2017
11 Tips For Better Vocal Recording Sessions
By Mark Marshall
Vocal sessions can be a some of the most challenging moments of making a record. Not because vocalists are difficult (we all know they are. Let's keep that to ourselves though), but because the human voice is affected greatly by environment and use.
Here are 11 tips to make your next session more consistent.
1. Speed Limit
We all love our coffee as a pick-me-upper. But what we might not realize is that caffeine dehydrates your vocal chords.
Dehydration is an enemy of vocalists. You should recommend every singer limits caffeine consumption either in soda, tea, energy drinks or coffee during tracking.
2. Boozehound
Alcohol also dehydrates the vocal chords.
Save the scotch for after the vocal tracking as a celebration. Whatever you think you gain in getting loose”, you lose in stability.
Alcohol also numbs the vocal chords. This can prevent you from knowing if you're doing damage. We all love a good party, but don't let it affect your performance.
3. H2-Woah”
Even if you're not drinking caffeine or alcohol, you still ned to keep drinking water.
Keep the hydration going. Always have extra bottles of water around or buy a Brita filter to clean tap water.
4. Voices Carry
I can go on about headphone mixes… Oh wait, I already did
It's vital that vocalists hear themselves very well. It's also really important the sound is flattering. This means adding reverb and compression (aka makeup).
After you get your levels set — which should be fast, as singers can be restless — put the makeup on fast.
5. Put Me In Coach
Everybody is budget-aware these days and for good reason. But, if you can spare a little extra bread, having a talented vocal coach there can really save you time and strain.
It has nothing to do with a vocal coach giving you tips on the style of singing. Nobody is trying to kill your mojo. It has everything to do with making sure the singers voice always stays in a safe place. The vocal takes will be more consistent and the singer won't wear out as fast.
Plus, if the vocalist is struggling, a vocal coach will know the dialogue to help out. They're not there as a dictator, simply as support for team artist.” I highly recommend this for less experienced singers on recording sessions.
6. Closing Time
Never book more than a 3-4 hour vocal session. Even 3-4 hours of singing is overkill. However, it's not likely in any session that the vocalist will be singing the full 3-4 hours. Unless they are struggling, in which case I suggest you check out tip #5 again.
Voices get tired. The more exhausted a singer gets, the more they strain. This could lead to improper singing and damage. Voices are sensitive and always being used for talking and yelling at the younger generation.
If you're overdubbing vocals as opposed to tracking live with a band, limit the session to one song a day. Split the vocal sessions up. Half of the day work on instrument overdubs or
editing. The other half, work on vocals. You're likely to get much better performances this way.
7. Wrap It Up
One can end up lost in a roundabout (who's been stuck in these while driving around Europe?)
Singers will keep saying, let's do it again.” They may plow over perfectly good takes.
Here's what I try to do: In the beginning I'll let them do 1-3 takes to get warmed up. After that, we listen after every take. This way they can keep dibs on what is working and if their mind is playing tricks on them.
It's important to prevent destructive cycles.
8. I Crossed Out The Options
Don't make a vocalist try different mics for an hour. You'll burn them out.
You need to be good enough at your job that you can narrow down the mics to audition to about 3. You're wasting valuable performance time. It's not going to matter if the 10th mic you tried blew the rest out of the water if you'll be capturing a strained performance.
Also, too much setup time can ice singers. You want things to flow and give them as little time to build up insecurities as possible.
9. Smokestack Lightening
I don't think I need to tell you how bad smoking is for anyone, let alone singers.
If you do smoke, don't think you can just quit a few days before a session and all will be good. Your voice will go through a change. My recommendation? Stop smoking. If not permanently, at least several weeks before tracking.
If you smoke recreational herbs (you know what I'm talking about Colorado), look into a vaporizer. Make sure to get a good vaporizer though. The cheap ones still burn a little. A good vaporizer is much kinder to your throat. Even with a vaporizer, I would recommend cleaning yourself up for sessions.
10. Cheat Sheet
Funny things happen on sessions. You can blank for no apparent reason.
You can prevent frustration by having a printed set of lyrics in front of the singer. That way, there is no guessing. Straight to the point.
12. Positive Vibrations
It seems really obvious, but refrain from negative comments.—
These 11 tips should greatly improve your next vocal session.
Vocal sessions can be a some of the most challenging moments of making a record. Not because vocalists are difficult (we all know they are. Let's keep that to ourselves though), but because the human voice is affected greatly by environment and use.
Here are 11 tips to make your next session more consistent.
1. Speed Limit
We all love our coffee as a pick-me-upper. But what we might not realize is that caffeine dehydrates your vocal chords.
Dehydration is an enemy of vocalists. You should recommend every singer limits caffeine consumption either in soda, tea, energy drinks or coffee during tracking.
2. Boozehound
Alcohol also dehydrates the vocal chords.
Save the scotch for after the vocal tracking as a celebration. Whatever you think you gain in getting loose”, you lose in stability.
Alcohol also numbs the vocal chords. This can prevent you from knowing if you're doing damage. We all love a good party, but don't let it affect your performance.
3. H2-Woah”
Even if you're not drinking caffeine or alcohol, you still ned to keep drinking water.
Keep the hydration going. Always have extra bottles of water around or buy a Brita filter to clean tap water.
4. Voices Carry
I can go on about headphone mixes… Oh wait, I already did
It's vital that vocalists hear themselves very well. It's also really important the sound is flattering. This means adding reverb and compression (aka makeup).
After you get your levels set — which should be fast, as singers can be restless — put the makeup on fast.
5. Put Me In Coach
Everybody is budget-aware these days and for good reason. But, if you can spare a little extra bread, having a talented vocal coach there can really save you time and strain.
It has nothing to do with a vocal coach giving you tips on the style of singing. Nobody is trying to kill your mojo. It has everything to do with making sure the singers voice always stays in a safe place. The vocal takes will be more consistent and the singer won't wear out as fast.
Plus, if the vocalist is struggling, a vocal coach will know the dialogue to help out. They're not there as a dictator, simply as support for team artist.” I highly recommend this for less experienced singers on recording sessions.
6. Closing Time
Never book more than a 3-4 hour vocal session. Even 3-4 hours of singing is overkill. However, it's not likely in any session that the vocalist will be singing the full 3-4 hours. Unless they are struggling, in which case I suggest you check out tip #5 again.
Voices get tired. The more exhausted a singer gets, the more they strain. This could lead to improper singing and damage. Voices are sensitive and always being used for talking and yelling at the younger generation.
If you're overdubbing vocals as opposed to tracking live with a band, limit the session to one song a day. Split the vocal sessions up. Half of the day work on instrument overdubs or
editing. The other half, work on vocals. You're likely to get much better performances this way.
7. Wrap It Up
One can end up lost in a roundabout (who's been stuck in these while driving around Europe?)
Singers will keep saying, let's do it again.” They may plow over perfectly good takes.
Here's what I try to do: In the beginning I'll let them do 1-3 takes to get warmed up. After that, we listen after every take. This way they can keep dibs on what is working and if their mind is playing tricks on them.
It's important to prevent destructive cycles.
8. I Crossed Out The Options
Don't make a vocalist try different mics for an hour. You'll burn them out.
You need to be good enough at your job that you can narrow down the mics to audition to about 3. You're wasting valuable performance time. It's not going to matter if the 10th mic you tried blew the rest out of the water if you'll be capturing a strained performance.
Also, too much setup time can ice singers. You want things to flow and give them as little time to build up insecurities as possible.
9. Smokestack Lightening
I don't think I need to tell you how bad smoking is for anyone, let alone singers.
If you do smoke, don't think you can just quit a few days before a session and all will be good. Your voice will go through a change. My recommendation? Stop smoking. If not permanently, at least several weeks before tracking.
If you smoke recreational herbs (you know what I'm talking about Colorado), look into a vaporizer. Make sure to get a good vaporizer though. The cheap ones still burn a little. A good vaporizer is much kinder to your throat. Even with a vaporizer, I would recommend cleaning yourself up for sessions.
10. Cheat Sheet
Funny things happen on sessions. You can blank for no apparent reason.
You can prevent frustration by having a printed set of lyrics in front of the singer. That way, there is no guessing. Straight to the point.
12. Positive Vibrations
It seems really obvious, but refrain from negative comments.—
These 11 tips should greatly improve your next vocal session.
Wednesday 4 January 2017
How The Bad Boys From Boston Recorded Their Finest Albums
The year was 1975, and a five-piece band from Boston known as Aerosmith had just wrapped up a lengthy tour to promote its sophomore release, Get Your Wings. Both that album and the band's self-titled debut had charted gold, but the members were still hungry—ravenous, even—for breakout success. Little did they know that the next 24 months would propel them from an opening act to full-fledged arena-rock superstars, and forge a legacy that, three decades later, would remain strong as ever.
But the band didn't get there alone. When studio mastermind Jack Douglas and engineer Jay Messina stepped onboard for the Get Your Wings sessions in 1973-74, they established the beginnings of a production team that would help provide the so-called Bad Boys from Boston” with the sounds, songs, and swagger to dominate the airwaves. Fully in charge for the next album—co-producer Ray Colcord and engineer Rod 'Brien helped with Wings—the duo channeled Aerosmith's raw, reckless brilliance into the 1974 smash Toys in the Attic, and its 1976 platinum follow-up album, Rocks. These groundbreaking and influential records secured Aerosmith's status as rulers of the mid-'70s hard-rock scene.
Now, 30-plus years after Toys in the Attic and Rocks first hit the shelves, Messina broke out the albums, and sat down with EQ to reveal the studio techniques used to create two rockin' masterpieces.
What was your experience prior to working with Aerosmith?
I started at Don Elliot Productions in 1966. Fun fact: Don had Les Paul's one-inch 8-track machine, of which there were only five in the world at the time. My first session there was with Ravi Shankar. I recorded it with David Lucas, the engineer who was there at the time, and I was told a doctor would pay me at the end of the session. Ravi and his band wanted to play to this psychedelic film, so we set up a 16mm projector in the control room—which made quite a racquet. At the end of the night, I went over to the doctor and got a check from him. The doctor was Timothy Leary.
Around 1968, I moved to A&R studios. Phil Ramone ran it, and it was kind of like a school. I started mastering vinyl there on a mono Neumann lathe. It was a really good background for me to get into before getting further into recording, because I got to know what not to do in my mixes. For example, you didn't want a lot of out-of-phase material, as it will lift the cover-cutter head right out of the grooves, and your record will skip. For the same reason, you had to be careful about the low end. Also, a circuit protected the cutter head from too much high-end voltage. It would just lift the head up, and you'd have to start the cutting process over. A lot of things that sounded fine on tape wouldn't translate to an actual vinyl record because of the limitations of the format.
I went to the Record Plant in New York City in 1970. As soon as you walked in the place, it felt like you were going into the coolest nightclub in town. For example, I was invited to see the Who record in Studio A, and there were all these colored lights turned down low. They were about to do some vocals—I could hear breathing out in the studio—and just by the level of the hiss from the return of the EMT plates and the general amplifier noise in the room, I could tell how loud it was going to be. They had a quad system in the room with 300-watt monitors, and they were all on. Sure enough, when they put the tape on, it was incredibly loud, but the sound was just awesome. To this day, Studio A is one of the best-sounding rooms I've heard.
What console was in there?
Studio A had a Spectrasonics console—which is very straight ahead. There wasn't a lot of flexibility with aux and cue sends, and you didn't get a lot of bells and whistles. But it was a super board, and you could get amazing sounds down on tape with it. Studio B and Studio C had Datamix consoles at that time.
It was while working at the Record Plant that you got hooked up with Jack Douglas, right?
Yes. Jack was assisting at that time, and he got on a few of my dates. We clicked as friends, and we also liked the way we worked together. It was a real natural partnership. Then, Jack got a couple of good opportunities to advance his production skills. I guess the first big one was when Bob Ezrin gave him the chance to co-produce Get Your Wings. Aerosmith was up and coming, and Columbia recognized them as a band that was going to happen. So that's when we met the guys, and Jack and I ended up working on Get Your Wings together. Well, that record didn't take off, but Columbia was still impressed with the band, and they also felt Jack and I were a good match for them. So we started Toys in the Attic.
Did the band write a lot of Toys in the Attic in the studio?
Yes, and also during pre-production with Jack. Certainly, a lot of vocalist Steven Tyler's lyrics were written in the studio. For instance, we all went to the movies one night, and saw Young Frankenstein. The walk this way” line in the film is what inspired Steven to write Walk This Way.” The band was in a very creative place.
What did you record Toys on?
The deck was an MCI two-inch 16-track that was running Ampex tape. We used the Spectrasonics console in Studio A, and we had some really cool outboard pieces such as Roger Mayer limiters, and an old Altec compressor that gave the guitars a cool, subtle squash.
How did you track the guitars on that album?
Typically, I would use the combination of a Shure SM57, a Sennheiser 421, and a Sony C37. I would place all three mics close to the grille, and mix the signals down to one track. The edge” would come from the 57 and the 421, while the C37 would provide the weight.” Sometimes, we would add a little bit of phasing to get some extra edge. We had an Eventide flanger that we used occasionally, as well, and if it sounded really good, we would just print the effect to tape. In the mix, we would usually pan Brad Whitford's guitar to the left, and Joe Perry's guitar to the right. They had some great old Fenders, and Joe used a small Gibson stereo amp that just sounded amazing. Most of the time, it was just one or two amps per player being tracked. Once we experimented with assigning one guitar to 13 amps, and miking them up. That's when we discovered that having 13 amps doesn't make the guitar sound 13 times better than one amp!
What about Joey Kramer's drums?
We set the drums on a wood floor. I would get a Sennheiser MKH 415 shotgun mic up as high as I could, point it straight down at the snare, and then put a Universal Audio 1176 on it, squashing it at around a 20:1 ratio. Generally, I would just add some of that channel under the dry track in the mix. On the snare, I sometimes used an Altec 633A salt shaker” in place of a Shure SM57. I only miked the top head, and I used a Pultec EQ to boost slightly at around 10kHz and 100Hz. The hi-hat mic would be a Neumann KM 84, and for the toms and overheads, I used Neumann U87s. With the overheads, I would position the mics so I had a good shot at all the cymbals, but I always tried to maintain the snare in the center of the image. For the kick, we used an Electro-Voice 666. We also added some board EQ on the kick to boost the low end at 50Hz, and the attack at around 3kHz.
Toys In The Attic had drums assigned to five tracks: kick on one, snare on two, everything else on three and four, and the shotgun mic on five. The exception was Sweet Emotion,” where the shotgun mic was multed to two preamps. One was limited with a UREI 1176, and the other with a Universal Audio 175. Each signal was printed on a separate track. I rarely adhered to traditional miking techniques back then. I was all about experimentation.
You also played some percussion on the album.
I played bass marimba on Sweet Emotion.” We felt the bass part was missing a little edge to it, and Jack knew I played vibes, so I gave it a shot, and doubled the bass part. It worked great with the bass sound. It's in the intro, and the re-intro after the first chorus.
Was Tom Hamilton's bass sound all direct, or a mix of amp and DI?
It was a mix of both amp and DI—which were submixed to a single channel. Tom used an Ampeg B15 amp, and we would take the direct line off the amp head. The mic would have been an Electro-Voice RE20. We also used an old Flickenger tube limiter—a monstrous bass compressor that had its own special sound. If you applied it moderately, it kept the low end from getting muddy, and it added lots of punch in the mids. We would occasionally use a Lang Program EQ to boost the 2kHz range for some added edge.
I heard Steven didn't use headphones for most of the album. How did you record his lead and background vocals?
When Steven didn't hear headphones, I would record him with the shotgun mic because of its narrow polar pattern. I would set him up with a couple of monitors in the live room, and send a mono feed. We'd place the monitors out of phase, and then position Steven in the sweet spot where the two signals almost completely cancelled each other out. If he was hearing headphones—which he did on occasion to sing background vocals and other parts—I'd use a U87. While the backgrounds are mostly Steven, Joe would sing occasionally, too. You can hear him on there if you listen.
Was Toys mixed right there at the Record Plant?
Yes, and it wasn't that difficult. Jack and I would both get our hands in there on the mix, and if we needed other hands, we would just ask. You couldn't be shy about asking for help, because there was no automation. You had to manually ride the faders. The mixes were often a combination of using extra hands, or mixing songs in pieces, and then editing sections together. We would cut and assemble the order on 1/4-inch tape running at 15ips. The whole record took around four months to finish.
What reverbs did you have at the time?
They had some really cool EMT plates, and a spring reverb. Most of the reverb you hear—like on Sweet Emotion”—was the EMTs. If we had a cool reverb sound going, we just printed it to tape.
Did you rely on a lot of compression for the mixes?
We didn't use much. We would hit the tape hard enough to get some natural compression, and then add just a little to the guitars and bass to even things out. The exception was the shotgun mic above Joey's snare. I'd really squash that one.
Later on, when we recorded Rocks, I'd take the drum mix—mostly kick and snare with a little bit of the overheads—and route it from an aux send to an 1176. I would really squash that signal at 20:1, and I'd have the input level up to the point where you think it's too much. The 1176's release function would almost enable you to put the compression in time with the song. What I mean is, based on how quick or slow the release was set, I could try to have the 1176 back to zero compression by the time of the next snare hit. That way, you always hear the crack of that next snare fully. Also, if you were hearing too much of the cymbals, you could slow up the release, and it wouldn't pull up a lot of cymbal bleed. When mixing, I would add the compressed signal in parallel to the other drums to get an apparent loudness to the kick and snare without adding much meter level. This is how we got that hit you in the chest sound” for Joey's drums.
How many tracks did you use?
When we remixed Toys in the Attic for 5.1 surround a few years ago, I had it transferred from the 16-track master to Pro Tools. When I looked at the track sheets, I noticed that there was at least one track open on all the songs. We basically used only 15 tracks for the whole record.
What did you print the mixes to?
The final master was a 1/4-inch Ampex tape. We were very conscious of the low end and any out-of-phase material, because we didn't want the vinyl records to skip. Doug Sax did a great job mastering the record. He sonically brought it up another notch.
Let's move onto Rocks. What's the story there?
The guys were rehearsing in a warehouse in Waltham, Massachusetts, and they were getting really comfortable up there. It turned out that everything sounded really good in the room, so we just parked the Record Plant mobile truck in the warehouse.
So you just miked everybody up where they were in the room as if they were practicing?
Yes—even to the point of using this huge speaker cabinet Joey had set up behind his drums for the rehearsals. He had a mic just lying in his bass drum, and we ran the signal through a little MXR equalizer with everything from 125Hz and up rolled off, and everything below 125Hz boosted all the way up. A big woof of air would come out of that cabinet, and he'd feel it every time he hit the bass drum. It made for a really cool bass-drum sound—although it bled through everything except the guitar mics that were positioned right on the speaker grilles.
How were the band members positioned in the warehouse?
They were set up in corners. As you walked in, the drums were just to the right. There was a guitar amp in the far right corner, a guitar amp in the far left corner, and Tom's bass rig was in another corner. It was so loud that they would easily hear each other no matter where they stood. That was the point. We isolated amps and the drum kit a bit with blankets, but, of course, that only worked so well.
Was everyone miked up the same way as on Toys?
Yes—although we did try a pair of binaural mics on Joey. Those mics have their applications, but they weren't an overwhelming success, in my opinion. We also miked this big cement room off the loading bay to get some ambience. It sounded huge. We got some great tracks up there, and we went back to the Record Plant for overdubs—mostly vocals, but some added percussion and guitar parts, as well—and mixing.
Here's a funny story—at that time, CBS had to have their union engineers on the session, so we always had these two guys hanging around the warehouse. Right at the end of one tune, we heard a door creak open. It was one of the guys coming back from coffee. In the mix, we had to make the creak louder, because we couldn't get rid of it. You can hear it at the beginning of Nobody's Fault.”
What console was in the mobile truck?
It was a DeMideo board that was super straight-ahead and clean. It had minimal EQ, so it was just used to get the sound on tape.
How did the limitations of the board affect your approach to recording the album?
It was a matter of just finding the right mic, putting it in the right place, and getting it on tape as clean as possible. In that sense, it made the album easy to record.
When you listen to Toys In The Attic and Rocks now, what are your thoughts on them?
I didn't realize at the time that these would be big releases, or that they would go down in history as classic rock records. Who knew that Walk This Way” and Sweet Emotion” would become the radio staples they did? But I do remember being excited about the sessions. These albums were fun to work on, and fun to mix, and it's nice to be driving in the car, and still hear them playing on the radio.
What comes across is the energy of the songs and the mixes—which is what we always wanted to put into the records in the first place. Listening back, it's not about asking, Is there enough 10kHz on this or that,” or focusing on specific technical points in the mix. It's more about reflecting on the album in the context of Does it feel good, and do you get excited when you hear it?” The answer, in these cases, is yes.” I guess the magic was there when we put the records together, and that magic still comes across in the mixes 30 years down the road.
Jack's Tales From the Attic
Often referred to as the sixth member of Aerosmith,” Jack Douglas was instrumental in helping shape the band's early sound. With a long track record that includes the likes of John Lennon and the Who, Douglas is certainly no stranger to making hit records. Here, he reflects on working behind the scenes with the bad boys from Boston” for Toys in the Attic.
What were some of the challenges in making the album?
At that time, their performances could be dodgy. They would get a few moments of brilliance, and then fall on their asses, but I wouldn't want to stop the take. I would just go for whatever I could get. Sometimes, I would be banging a cowbell in a booth just so the tempo would stay straight. That way, I could edit all the takes together when it was done, because the brilliant parts would just be incredible.
The band has often called you their sixth member.” Explain the specifics of that role.
That sixth member” phrase is because of the situations that went down in preproduction, when I would basically move in with them. We would create songs from the ground up, and, because of their touring schedule, they would just show up and ask, Got any songs?” We would develop stuff from the ground up—such as the riff on Walk This Way,” or the bass part to Sweet Emotion.” The major contributors were Steven, Joe, and myself, but everyone certainly pitched in.
You mixed Toys with flying fingers.
That's right! We would mark fader levels with pencils—and even tape razor blades down to block faders from being moved past a certain point—and then it would be all hands on deck.
Sometimes, you would just do a verse, then reset for the chorus, and make all your pre-planned moves. There would be stop points set for the drum fills, and so on. I miss that process, because things happened by accident on those records that were just really cool.
Did you realize how great Toys was when you were working on it?
No. I was too close to it. When Bruce Lundvall president, Columbia Records came in to listen to the whole album, I was thinking, Oh my god, its just terrible.” I thought it must have sounded like this mushy big mess flying at him. After it was over, Bruce said, I think I can take a breath now.” And I thought, Wow, he really hates it.” But then he said, It's brilliant. There's gotta be four singles on there that are amazing.” And there are only nine songs on that record!
Hewitt's Rocking Mobile Rig
David Hewitt—the Grammy-winning President/Chief Engineer of Remote Recording—was on the scene when Aerosmith recorded Rocks. Leaving the hustle and bustle of New York, the band and production team set up shop in an empty warehouse in Massachusetts, not far from Aerosmith's hometown of Boston. To track the sessions, Hewitt rolled up an entire mobile studio, and here he tells us about some of the gear he brought in to keep the sessions running smoothly.
What was the setup for Rocks?
The band had a rehearsal room called the Where-house—a big, insulated industrial space with unusually high ceilings. We brought the Record Plant's truck up there, which had a DeMideo console loaded with UREI 1108 modules. These were basically solid-state discrete versions of the old tube circuits UREI had made, so they sounded really good.
How many inputs did the console have?
It only had 24 inputs and eight mix busses, and tracking was a little difficult due to the limited inputs. To get around that, we also used some Ampex AM10 submixers, which were six by two. We brought the submixers in on line positions, because, even then, we started using up to 35 or 40 inputs for the band. Joey had tons of drums, Jay had room mics up, and Brad and Joe had a bunch of guitar amps all around. Every time they would add something, I'd be scrambling to find another preamp somewhere, and another way to get it in.
What tape machines did you use?
We were still doing 16 tracks at that point, and we had a pair of Ampex MM1000s—the first 16-track recorders ever produced. Those things were big and clunky, but they sounded great.
Where did you put the truck?
We actually pulled the truck right inside the Where-house from the loading dock. Everything stayed in the truck. We ran the cables out into the room, and set things up just like a live date. We had great big honking Westlake monitors that were just awful. They reached compression at like 9 'clock, but the guys knew them well that we used them. The whole point was to make the band feel like they were just rehearsing—to catch them in their element—and that's what we did.
But the band didn't get there alone. When studio mastermind Jack Douglas and engineer Jay Messina stepped onboard for the Get Your Wings sessions in 1973-74, they established the beginnings of a production team that would help provide the so-called Bad Boys from Boston” with the sounds, songs, and swagger to dominate the airwaves. Fully in charge for the next album—co-producer Ray Colcord and engineer Rod 'Brien helped with Wings—the duo channeled Aerosmith's raw, reckless brilliance into the 1974 smash Toys in the Attic, and its 1976 platinum follow-up album, Rocks. These groundbreaking and influential records secured Aerosmith's status as rulers of the mid-'70s hard-rock scene.
Now, 30-plus years after Toys in the Attic and Rocks first hit the shelves, Messina broke out the albums, and sat down with EQ to reveal the studio techniques used to create two rockin' masterpieces.
What was your experience prior to working with Aerosmith?
I started at Don Elliot Productions in 1966. Fun fact: Don had Les Paul's one-inch 8-track machine, of which there were only five in the world at the time. My first session there was with Ravi Shankar. I recorded it with David Lucas, the engineer who was there at the time, and I was told a doctor would pay me at the end of the session. Ravi and his band wanted to play to this psychedelic film, so we set up a 16mm projector in the control room—which made quite a racquet. At the end of the night, I went over to the doctor and got a check from him. The doctor was Timothy Leary.
Around 1968, I moved to A&R studios. Phil Ramone ran it, and it was kind of like a school. I started mastering vinyl there on a mono Neumann lathe. It was a really good background for me to get into before getting further into recording, because I got to know what not to do in my mixes. For example, you didn't want a lot of out-of-phase material, as it will lift the cover-cutter head right out of the grooves, and your record will skip. For the same reason, you had to be careful about the low end. Also, a circuit protected the cutter head from too much high-end voltage. It would just lift the head up, and you'd have to start the cutting process over. A lot of things that sounded fine on tape wouldn't translate to an actual vinyl record because of the limitations of the format.
I went to the Record Plant in New York City in 1970. As soon as you walked in the place, it felt like you were going into the coolest nightclub in town. For example, I was invited to see the Who record in Studio A, and there were all these colored lights turned down low. They were about to do some vocals—I could hear breathing out in the studio—and just by the level of the hiss from the return of the EMT plates and the general amplifier noise in the room, I could tell how loud it was going to be. They had a quad system in the room with 300-watt monitors, and they were all on. Sure enough, when they put the tape on, it was incredibly loud, but the sound was just awesome. To this day, Studio A is one of the best-sounding rooms I've heard.
What console was in there?
Studio A had a Spectrasonics console—which is very straight ahead. There wasn't a lot of flexibility with aux and cue sends, and you didn't get a lot of bells and whistles. But it was a super board, and you could get amazing sounds down on tape with it. Studio B and Studio C had Datamix consoles at that time.
It was while working at the Record Plant that you got hooked up with Jack Douglas, right?
Yes. Jack was assisting at that time, and he got on a few of my dates. We clicked as friends, and we also liked the way we worked together. It was a real natural partnership. Then, Jack got a couple of good opportunities to advance his production skills. I guess the first big one was when Bob Ezrin gave him the chance to co-produce Get Your Wings. Aerosmith was up and coming, and Columbia recognized them as a band that was going to happen. So that's when we met the guys, and Jack and I ended up working on Get Your Wings together. Well, that record didn't take off, but Columbia was still impressed with the band, and they also felt Jack and I were a good match for them. So we started Toys in the Attic.
Did the band write a lot of Toys in the Attic in the studio?
Yes, and also during pre-production with Jack. Certainly, a lot of vocalist Steven Tyler's lyrics were written in the studio. For instance, we all went to the movies one night, and saw Young Frankenstein. The walk this way” line in the film is what inspired Steven to write Walk This Way.” The band was in a very creative place.
What did you record Toys on?
The deck was an MCI two-inch 16-track that was running Ampex tape. We used the Spectrasonics console in Studio A, and we had some really cool outboard pieces such as Roger Mayer limiters, and an old Altec compressor that gave the guitars a cool, subtle squash.
How did you track the guitars on that album?
Typically, I would use the combination of a Shure SM57, a Sennheiser 421, and a Sony C37. I would place all three mics close to the grille, and mix the signals down to one track. The edge” would come from the 57 and the 421, while the C37 would provide the weight.” Sometimes, we would add a little bit of phasing to get some extra edge. We had an Eventide flanger that we used occasionally, as well, and if it sounded really good, we would just print the effect to tape. In the mix, we would usually pan Brad Whitford's guitar to the left, and Joe Perry's guitar to the right. They had some great old Fenders, and Joe used a small Gibson stereo amp that just sounded amazing. Most of the time, it was just one or two amps per player being tracked. Once we experimented with assigning one guitar to 13 amps, and miking them up. That's when we discovered that having 13 amps doesn't make the guitar sound 13 times better than one amp!
What about Joey Kramer's drums?
We set the drums on a wood floor. I would get a Sennheiser MKH 415 shotgun mic up as high as I could, point it straight down at the snare, and then put a Universal Audio 1176 on it, squashing it at around a 20:1 ratio. Generally, I would just add some of that channel under the dry track in the mix. On the snare, I sometimes used an Altec 633A salt shaker” in place of a Shure SM57. I only miked the top head, and I used a Pultec EQ to boost slightly at around 10kHz and 100Hz. The hi-hat mic would be a Neumann KM 84, and for the toms and overheads, I used Neumann U87s. With the overheads, I would position the mics so I had a good shot at all the cymbals, but I always tried to maintain the snare in the center of the image. For the kick, we used an Electro-Voice 666. We also added some board EQ on the kick to boost the low end at 50Hz, and the attack at around 3kHz.
Toys In The Attic had drums assigned to five tracks: kick on one, snare on two, everything else on three and four, and the shotgun mic on five. The exception was Sweet Emotion,” where the shotgun mic was multed to two preamps. One was limited with a UREI 1176, and the other with a Universal Audio 175. Each signal was printed on a separate track. I rarely adhered to traditional miking techniques back then. I was all about experimentation.
You also played some percussion on the album.
I played bass marimba on Sweet Emotion.” We felt the bass part was missing a little edge to it, and Jack knew I played vibes, so I gave it a shot, and doubled the bass part. It worked great with the bass sound. It's in the intro, and the re-intro after the first chorus.
Was Tom Hamilton's bass sound all direct, or a mix of amp and DI?
It was a mix of both amp and DI—which were submixed to a single channel. Tom used an Ampeg B15 amp, and we would take the direct line off the amp head. The mic would have been an Electro-Voice RE20. We also used an old Flickenger tube limiter—a monstrous bass compressor that had its own special sound. If you applied it moderately, it kept the low end from getting muddy, and it added lots of punch in the mids. We would occasionally use a Lang Program EQ to boost the 2kHz range for some added edge.
I heard Steven didn't use headphones for most of the album. How did you record his lead and background vocals?
When Steven didn't hear headphones, I would record him with the shotgun mic because of its narrow polar pattern. I would set him up with a couple of monitors in the live room, and send a mono feed. We'd place the monitors out of phase, and then position Steven in the sweet spot where the two signals almost completely cancelled each other out. If he was hearing headphones—which he did on occasion to sing background vocals and other parts—I'd use a U87. While the backgrounds are mostly Steven, Joe would sing occasionally, too. You can hear him on there if you listen.
Was Toys mixed right there at the Record Plant?
Yes, and it wasn't that difficult. Jack and I would both get our hands in there on the mix, and if we needed other hands, we would just ask. You couldn't be shy about asking for help, because there was no automation. You had to manually ride the faders. The mixes were often a combination of using extra hands, or mixing songs in pieces, and then editing sections together. We would cut and assemble the order on 1/4-inch tape running at 15ips. The whole record took around four months to finish.
What reverbs did you have at the time?
They had some really cool EMT plates, and a spring reverb. Most of the reverb you hear—like on Sweet Emotion”—was the EMTs. If we had a cool reverb sound going, we just printed it to tape.
Did you rely on a lot of compression for the mixes?
We didn't use much. We would hit the tape hard enough to get some natural compression, and then add just a little to the guitars and bass to even things out. The exception was the shotgun mic above Joey's snare. I'd really squash that one.
Later on, when we recorded Rocks, I'd take the drum mix—mostly kick and snare with a little bit of the overheads—and route it from an aux send to an 1176. I would really squash that signal at 20:1, and I'd have the input level up to the point where you think it's too much. The 1176's release function would almost enable you to put the compression in time with the song. What I mean is, based on how quick or slow the release was set, I could try to have the 1176 back to zero compression by the time of the next snare hit. That way, you always hear the crack of that next snare fully. Also, if you were hearing too much of the cymbals, you could slow up the release, and it wouldn't pull up a lot of cymbal bleed. When mixing, I would add the compressed signal in parallel to the other drums to get an apparent loudness to the kick and snare without adding much meter level. This is how we got that hit you in the chest sound” for Joey's drums.
How many tracks did you use?
When we remixed Toys in the Attic for 5.1 surround a few years ago, I had it transferred from the 16-track master to Pro Tools. When I looked at the track sheets, I noticed that there was at least one track open on all the songs. We basically used only 15 tracks for the whole record.
What did you print the mixes to?
The final master was a 1/4-inch Ampex tape. We were very conscious of the low end and any out-of-phase material, because we didn't want the vinyl records to skip. Doug Sax did a great job mastering the record. He sonically brought it up another notch.
Let's move onto Rocks. What's the story there?
The guys were rehearsing in a warehouse in Waltham, Massachusetts, and they were getting really comfortable up there. It turned out that everything sounded really good in the room, so we just parked the Record Plant mobile truck in the warehouse.
So you just miked everybody up where they were in the room as if they were practicing?
Yes—even to the point of using this huge speaker cabinet Joey had set up behind his drums for the rehearsals. He had a mic just lying in his bass drum, and we ran the signal through a little MXR equalizer with everything from 125Hz and up rolled off, and everything below 125Hz boosted all the way up. A big woof of air would come out of that cabinet, and he'd feel it every time he hit the bass drum. It made for a really cool bass-drum sound—although it bled through everything except the guitar mics that were positioned right on the speaker grilles.
How were the band members positioned in the warehouse?
They were set up in corners. As you walked in, the drums were just to the right. There was a guitar amp in the far right corner, a guitar amp in the far left corner, and Tom's bass rig was in another corner. It was so loud that they would easily hear each other no matter where they stood. That was the point. We isolated amps and the drum kit a bit with blankets, but, of course, that only worked so well.
Was everyone miked up the same way as on Toys?
Yes—although we did try a pair of binaural mics on Joey. Those mics have their applications, but they weren't an overwhelming success, in my opinion. We also miked this big cement room off the loading bay to get some ambience. It sounded huge. We got some great tracks up there, and we went back to the Record Plant for overdubs—mostly vocals, but some added percussion and guitar parts, as well—and mixing.
Here's a funny story—at that time, CBS had to have their union engineers on the session, so we always had these two guys hanging around the warehouse. Right at the end of one tune, we heard a door creak open. It was one of the guys coming back from coffee. In the mix, we had to make the creak louder, because we couldn't get rid of it. You can hear it at the beginning of Nobody's Fault.”
What console was in the mobile truck?
It was a DeMideo board that was super straight-ahead and clean. It had minimal EQ, so it was just used to get the sound on tape.
How did the limitations of the board affect your approach to recording the album?
It was a matter of just finding the right mic, putting it in the right place, and getting it on tape as clean as possible. In that sense, it made the album easy to record.
When you listen to Toys In The Attic and Rocks now, what are your thoughts on them?
I didn't realize at the time that these would be big releases, or that they would go down in history as classic rock records. Who knew that Walk This Way” and Sweet Emotion” would become the radio staples they did? But I do remember being excited about the sessions. These albums were fun to work on, and fun to mix, and it's nice to be driving in the car, and still hear them playing on the radio.
What comes across is the energy of the songs and the mixes—which is what we always wanted to put into the records in the first place. Listening back, it's not about asking, Is there enough 10kHz on this or that,” or focusing on specific technical points in the mix. It's more about reflecting on the album in the context of Does it feel good, and do you get excited when you hear it?” The answer, in these cases, is yes.” I guess the magic was there when we put the records together, and that magic still comes across in the mixes 30 years down the road.
Jack's Tales From the Attic
Often referred to as the sixth member of Aerosmith,” Jack Douglas was instrumental in helping shape the band's early sound. With a long track record that includes the likes of John Lennon and the Who, Douglas is certainly no stranger to making hit records. Here, he reflects on working behind the scenes with the bad boys from Boston” for Toys in the Attic.
What were some of the challenges in making the album?
At that time, their performances could be dodgy. They would get a few moments of brilliance, and then fall on their asses, but I wouldn't want to stop the take. I would just go for whatever I could get. Sometimes, I would be banging a cowbell in a booth just so the tempo would stay straight. That way, I could edit all the takes together when it was done, because the brilliant parts would just be incredible.
The band has often called you their sixth member.” Explain the specifics of that role.
That sixth member” phrase is because of the situations that went down in preproduction, when I would basically move in with them. We would create songs from the ground up, and, because of their touring schedule, they would just show up and ask, Got any songs?” We would develop stuff from the ground up—such as the riff on Walk This Way,” or the bass part to Sweet Emotion.” The major contributors were Steven, Joe, and myself, but everyone certainly pitched in.
You mixed Toys with flying fingers.
That's right! We would mark fader levels with pencils—and even tape razor blades down to block faders from being moved past a certain point—and then it would be all hands on deck.
Sometimes, you would just do a verse, then reset for the chorus, and make all your pre-planned moves. There would be stop points set for the drum fills, and so on. I miss that process, because things happened by accident on those records that were just really cool.
Did you realize how great Toys was when you were working on it?
No. I was too close to it. When Bruce Lundvall president, Columbia Records came in to listen to the whole album, I was thinking, Oh my god, its just terrible.” I thought it must have sounded like this mushy big mess flying at him. After it was over, Bruce said, I think I can take a breath now.” And I thought, Wow, he really hates it.” But then he said, It's brilliant. There's gotta be four singles on there that are amazing.” And there are only nine songs on that record!
Hewitt's Rocking Mobile Rig
David Hewitt—the Grammy-winning President/Chief Engineer of Remote Recording—was on the scene when Aerosmith recorded Rocks. Leaving the hustle and bustle of New York, the band and production team set up shop in an empty warehouse in Massachusetts, not far from Aerosmith's hometown of Boston. To track the sessions, Hewitt rolled up an entire mobile studio, and here he tells us about some of the gear he brought in to keep the sessions running smoothly.
What was the setup for Rocks?
The band had a rehearsal room called the Where-house—a big, insulated industrial space with unusually high ceilings. We brought the Record Plant's truck up there, which had a DeMideo console loaded with UREI 1108 modules. These were basically solid-state discrete versions of the old tube circuits UREI had made, so they sounded really good.
How many inputs did the console have?
It only had 24 inputs and eight mix busses, and tracking was a little difficult due to the limited inputs. To get around that, we also used some Ampex AM10 submixers, which were six by two. We brought the submixers in on line positions, because, even then, we started using up to 35 or 40 inputs for the band. Joey had tons of drums, Jay had room mics up, and Brad and Joe had a bunch of guitar amps all around. Every time they would add something, I'd be scrambling to find another preamp somewhere, and another way to get it in.
What tape machines did you use?
We were still doing 16 tracks at that point, and we had a pair of Ampex MM1000s—the first 16-track recorders ever produced. Those things were big and clunky, but they sounded great.
Where did you put the truck?
We actually pulled the truck right inside the Where-house from the loading dock. Everything stayed in the truck. We ran the cables out into the room, and set things up just like a live date. We had great big honking Westlake monitors that were just awful. They reached compression at like 9 'clock, but the guys knew them well that we used them. The whole point was to make the band feel like they were just rehearsing—to catch them in their element—and that's what we did.
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