60s Style Recording Techniques

When you think about those sixties and seventies recordings, nobody used any kind of boutique microphone preamps back then. We used the microphone preamps that were in the consoles. There really weren't many manufacturers of consoles back then. Consoles by the major record labels were frequently custom-made.

The early console manufacturers which started up in the middle late sixties were API, Electrodyne, Quad 8, Sphere, Neve, Helios, Norelco/Philips, Auditronics, MCI, Neumann, to name a few, a very few. So you really never complained back then about sonic integrity, blah blah, etc.. We were more concerned with what brand of analog tape and how you tweaked your machines.

Monitor speakers were frequently Altec 604E's or, JBL 4310's. Compressors and limiters were frequently Universal Audio optical LA2 tube or LA3 transistor, FET 1176LN, RCA, CBS, Fairchild and were optical devices or variable "mu" tubes, predecessor to the VCA (voltage controlled amplifier).

Microphone selection was also fairly limited back then. Dominated by Neumann U47/67/87 and a host of others along with the RCA 44 & 77 series of ribbon microphones. And becoming popular was a line of dynamic microphones by Shure. The unidyne series proceeded the well-known SM57 but were very similar.

Much of that sound was a LESS IS MORE approach. We didn't have nothin' in comparison to what we have today. So what you are hearing is pretty much good experience, technique and knowledge, since we were all using pretty much the same stuff.

When it came to Chambers, if you worked for a really good place like Capitol, your chamber was probably specially manufactured rooms or stairwells. If you were poor, you had a spring reverb. If you were rich, you had an EMT plate. If you were really creative, you could use a tape machine for all sorts of effects, like echoes, delays, phasing/flanging. You could also take a beefy power amplifier, connect that to a sinewave oscillator and voilà! Variable speed generator for your tape recorder.

And tape saturation was a big part of the character of the sound. Learning how to bang the meters just the right way, drums took on a different character. You could do most anything if you had 4 to 8 tracks to work with!

So emulating that sound of a late sixties to early and mid-seventies recording can still be easily accomplished. Yes, the sound of the microphone preamps was a big factor in the sound. None of those older consoles had limited headroom like most of the inexpensive mixers have today. So to try and emulate that older sound means, you need plenty of headroom in your console/preamps. You can get that sound by running your microphone gain trims lower than normal, while pushing up your faders for proper record levels. This will give you improved headroom but will sacrifice some of the signal to noise ratio but since we are probably talking rock and roll here, it won't be much of a factor. That additional headroom will give you that higher-quality, expensive console sound with that punchy quality without maxing out your mike preamps.

George Martin thought I was a worthwhile engineer but I declined his offer as a maintenance Tech.
Ms. Stoopid Remy

Theres a very very common thread here to your list of artists you're seeking to emulate the recordings of............That being the songs themselves. And the arrangements.

The recording approach was simplified because of the LACK of gear available. Lack of tracks meant you HAD to make decisions about the structure of the material....what sections to mix down to open some tracks up for more creativity.

Its the very thing that is lacking today in mainstream music. Its so overproduced and homoginized that it lacks depth and heart.