Chris Michie At AIR Studios The Tape

When Broken Barricades was started in late 1970, AIR Studios consisted of two studios (Studios One and Two), a mixing room with a small vocal booth (Studio Three) plus a film sound mixing room that was actually once used as a studio by the Third Ear Band, who recorded the soundtrack to Polanski's MacBeth in it. Broken Barricades was recorded in Studio One, which was a big room suitable for orchestral recording and film scoring (the film side of AIR's business took years to get going and was a bit of a white elephant). I think Studio One was modeled on Abbey Road's Studio One. Anyway, it was the first studio finished when AIR opened in summer 1970 and is where the first sessions were held.

I had been hired earlier that summer by studio manager Keith Slaughter, probably because I kept showing up during construction looking for a job - a real life example of the squeaky wheel getting the grease. For a few weeks or months I worked for Dave Harries and two other maintenance engineers called Bill (I think) and Danny, wiring up jackfields and pulling cables through the ducts between studio and control room. Already on staff were engineers Bill Price (from Decca) and Jack Clegg (from film scoring studio CTS). Ex-Decca engineer John Punter and tape-ops Alan Harris (ex-Morgan, I think) and Alex somebody joined soon after. Nigel somebody, Steve Nye and Simaen Skolfeld were all later hired as tape-ops, John Middleton was hired as a film sound engineer (though he also recorded half of Roxy Music's For Your Pleasure before the producer was sacked and Chris Thomas and John Punter took over) and the staff also included various receptionists, an ex-Abbey Road tea lady, and two porters, one of whom was a fantastically cheerful Jamaican, who would move the session players' instruments in and out (bands had roadies for that). I was the first of the original crew to leave, I think, though Simaen Skolfeld may have exited under a cloud after failing to turn up for a weekend Pink Floyd session - I found the band waiting outside the studio doors when I turned up for a session of my own, and as I later found out for myself, Pink Floyd did not suffer indignity in silence.

Multitrack recording has changed quite a bit since the '70s, but it probably changed more between Sgt. Pepper's.. and Exotic Birds and Fruit than any time since. Procol went through those changes, from 4-track for their first album through 8-track on Home , 16-track up through Grand Hotel and finally 24-track for Exotic.. (I've always assumed that the reason there was never a stereo mix of the 1st album is because someone had re-used the 1-inch four-track tape after the original mono mix had been finished - that stuff was expensive.

Does anyone know the full story?

There were many technical advances made during the few years between Broken Barricades and Exotic Birds and Fruit, but the general recording principles remained the same; only the tools changed. For example, though the AKG D12 (a dynamic mic) had been the traditional choice for bass (kick) drum in the 1960s and early 70s, it later became common to use an expensive, large diaphragm condenser microphone like the Neumann U87. Though the U87 had both 10dB pad and bass rolloff switches built into it, the accepted wisdom had been that the high transients and sheer SPL put out by a bass drum would likely tear the diaphragm from its surround, or at least produce a distorted signal. There may have been some truth to this theory, but it has to be remembered that until the 70s most studio engineers came up through a fairly rigid training and apprentice program. In the large company studios (Decca's West Hampstead, EMI's Abbey Road, Pye, CBS, etc.) the recording engineers were trained and managed by the maintenance engineers. A young engineer who used the "wrong" mics or abused the equipment in other ways would not do well in a work environment run by men in white coats. I am speculating here, but it seems probable that the habits of economy and "making do" practised in post-war Britain were carried on for some time by an "old guard" of technical engineers long after the fantastic growth of the recording industry had changed the rules. The Beatles had demonstrated that you could spend several months making a record, rather than several hours, and still make a profit, so it became less and less sensible for studio managers to refuse to let visiting engineers and artists do what they wanted - after all, the bills were now going to independent managers and record labels rather than to the studio's corporate parents.

AIR Studios was an independent studio, but it was run by managers and technical staff who had been poached from Abbey Road and Decca, so tended to have a rather stuffier atmosphere than other independents, like Trident, Island, Morgan and Olympic. There were, of course, occasional fire extinguisher fights and other isolated incidents of mayhem, but engineers and clients generally behaved rather well. During the day, of course, there were various technical and administrative people around, but after 6 pm there was usually only a night watchman and whoever was working in the other studios. But I distinctly remember the day that Todd Rundgren turned up with green streaks in his hair - that wasn't the sort of thing you saw in the corridors of AIR very often.

All this is a very long-winded way of explaining that as the years went by engineers developed more radical methods of recording. There were few, if any books on recording technique, so most engineers learned by watching others. On entering another engineer's session one would immediately listen for a moment and then say something like "nice drum sound." If it really was a nice drum sound, then a smart visiting engineer would figure out what the resident engineer was doing, and copy it. I still remember the drum-miking set up that I learned from an engineer who had copied it from Glyn Johns (long associated with Olympic). Since it's the mic setup that was (probably) used on Beggars' Banquet and Led Zeppelin (the first album), I'll describe here what was described to me. Snare and kick mic as usual, and I don't know which mics Johns favored. But instead of individual tom-tom mics, set close and pointing down into the drum shell, plus a stereo overhead pair, Johns set up only two kit mics, both Neumann U87s (or the previous model, the U67). One was positioned above the two rack toms at about the height of the drummer's forehead, the other at the (drummer's) right rear corner of the kit next to the floor tom and facing across it toward the snare.

Between them, these two mics picked up the entire kit and panning the two mics left and right gave a good stereo spread. It's hard to convey this now, but at the time I heard about this technique (and heard it demonstrated) I was very impressed. I had learned to engineer by watching engineers close-mic virtually everything (e.g. to mic a harp, you wrapped the mic in a sock or foam, and inserted it into the instrument from the pedal end), and the idea of an overall drum mix from two mics, supplemented by kick and snare "spot" mics struck me as radical. Of course, in the 40s and 50s engineers were careful not to put mics too near to percussion instruments, for fear that the transients would distort or blow out the diaphragms, so I was really only rediscovering an old technique. As the 70s progressed, drum sounds moved away from Ringo's muffled toms and the techniques of super separation (listen to Ken Scott 's early recordings of Billy Cobham). Partly because of Led Zeppelin's success, but also because their records were superbly produced, the open, crashing sound of John Bonham soon became more fashionable than the dry, padded drum sound typical of early 70s rock albums. Led Zeppelin's When the Levee Breaks has, I think, the most extraordinarily enormous yet somehow realistic drum sound ever recorded, and it launched a complete re-evaluation of the way that drums should sound on record, leading to a decade of ambience mics and PAs in the studio.

So, as I was saying, fashions in mics came and went. Bill Price and John Punter had trained at Decca Records' West Hampstead studios, so tended to follow the techniques they'd developed there. AIR was well-equipped with Neumann and AKG condenser mics and when Geoff Emerick came over from Apple he used the Coles 4038 ribbon mics he'd been using on Beatles records. (They were actually called something else then, I can't remember what, but Coles makes them now.) American producers would show up and be stunned at the number of Neumann U87s we had in stock, but they'd also ask for things we didn't have and be surprised we didn't all use Shure SM57s on snare. There was an AKG dynamic mic called (I think) the D212 that some people used on toms and bass and brass instruments, and an AKG 224 dynamic pencil mic that Tony Ashton insisted on as a vocal mic for a particularly disastrous (for me) Ashton, Gardner & Dyke session that I engineered for Gus Dudgeon.

DOLBY SIGNAL STRETCHERS

My guess is that Broken Barricades was recorded with the then-fairly-new Dolby A "signal stretcher" devices. These were big suckers, and 16 channels took up two full racks, each about four feet high. Eventually, the switching was automated, but for a significant period you had to manually switch each channel back and forth between record and play modes.

This was, of course, a job for the tape op, and a damn tedious one it was. I distinctly remember that the remix session for The Paul Winter Consort's Icarus album was a nightmare.

George Martin had produced this in America around the same time as the second Capitol Seatrain album, but Paul Winter had done a bunch of recording himself and wanted various tracks to be compiled from different performances - recorded at different studios with different musicians and different track layouts. Once the multi-track tapes were assembled, as each edit passed the playback head the bass would suddenly switch from track 1 to track 11 and the whole tape would go from Dolby to non-Dolby. Bill Price did the mix, sometimes a few bars at a time, exactly the kind of mind-boggling technical problem-solving that he could do in his sleep, while I tried manfully to keep up with the Dolby switching. I wasn't very good at it, but Bill seemed to think I showed promise and the other available tape ops weren't much better, so I stayed with the project.

If you want to hear how a Dolby encoded track sounds like when it hasn't been decoded, listen to Eno's first album. It was mixed by Chris Thomas and there's a track where they just left the Dolbys off when making the production master - it sounds all grainy and trashy and squished, which is presumably exactly what they were after.

24-TRACK

Though AIR was at the technical forefront in 1972 with 16-track recording (Pink Floyd came to AIR to finish the Meddle album on 16-track because Abbey Road was still only 8-track), 24-track soon became the next big thing. Studer had by this time figured out how to make a 2-inch machine (the A80?) and during the time I was away from AIR (February 1972 to September 1973) they must have switched the whole studio to that format. So Exotic Birds and Fruit was recorded 24-track.

Dolby's original eight- or ten-rackspace Signal Stretchers had shrunk down to a single rack space per channel and eventually wound up as cards, so 24 channels of Dolby A plus various channels for stereo and mixdown could easily be accommodated in a couple of equipment racks. Wherever a signal was going to tape, you patched it through Dolbys, and I remember John Punter using Dolby on the send and return signals to tape delay - before sending a signal to an echo chamber or EMT reverberation plate, it was common to delay the signal a few milliseconds by passing it through a tape delay machine. In true Abbey Road style, this setup had the acronym STEED for stereo echo, echo delay (or something similar). Similarly, ADT was for years the accepted shorthand for artificial (or automatic) double tracking.

Recording, Editing And Mixing

Here are some tips and suggestions for recording, editing and mixing vocals, from the perspective of a producer/engineer.

Although my focus is rock music, some of the following suggestions should be useful for other types of music but which may require different approaches.

In almost all articles about any type of audio recording, you'll hear there are no rules — whatever sounds good, is good.” The same is true for recording vocals; experimentation is important, and as each song and singer require a different technique, trying out ideas is even more important.

I do believe that there is still one rule though: a great performance trumps perfect pitch and timing, and also is far more important than the vocal sound itself. I'd rather hear a vocal that is totally believable and involves me in the meaning and emotion of the song than a vocal edited into technical brilliance with cool effects and perfect sonics, but is stiff, uninvolving and robotic.

The Recording Space

Where and how you set up your recording area for vocals will have as much, if not more, effect than your choice of equipment. Make sure that the microphone is not in the center of the room; this is where standing waves will be most prominent. The best position is usually about a third along the longest dimension, but roughly equidistant from the side walls.

Use acoustic baffles and sound absorbing materials to create a good space within your recording room. Remember that you want to have sound absorption behind the singer, and also (although not as important if you're using a cardiod patterned mic) behind the mic. Pick an area of your room that is well away from reflective surfaces.

If you're recording at home, a good, inexpensive, way to create free-standing acoustic screens is to construct a frame using 1″ PVC piping, usually used for garden sprinklers. This stuff is available from any big box hardware store, and is very cheap and easy to work with. Buy several lengths of piping, some T-joints to make stands, some 90 degree bend pieces and glue. Sketch out your plans, measure accurately and make them sufficiently tall - 7′ is usually a good height, and you really only care about the top 4′. Once you've double-checked your measurements, start cutting the pipes. Assemble the entire frame ‘dry' first to make sure that all your pieces work together, and once you have made sure that your measurements are accurate, start gluing. Now use these frames as hangers for quilts, duvets, blankets or sleeping bags thrown over the top. If you're more ambitious, use furniture movers' packing blankets which are also very cheap. You should easily be able to construct several complete screens for less than $25 each.

If you want to get even more ambitious, construct wood frames and Owens Corning 703 semi-rigid panels, covered with an open weave fabric such as burlap. A box of six 48″ x 24″ x 2″ panels can be found for around $70. You can get fancy by making one side of the screen absorbent, and use peg board on the other side to be more reflective.

Microphone Technique and Position

Good singers will move their position relative to the microphone depending on the changing vocals levels during the song. Too much movement, and varying room reflections will change the sound, resulting in a less consistent, and potentially more remote sound. However, even experienced singers forget mic position when they get caught up in the emotion of the performance. Part of the producer/engineer's job is to make the singer relaxed and comfortable, and able to concentrate on the performance. Nagging singers about anything is usually a bad idea, and can be annoying. Mention microphone position a couple of times, but be supportive and gentle. With some more inexperienced singers, it can help to make a mark on the floor with tape, and suggest to the singer that that's their mark. This doesn't help much with singers who ‘lean' into the mic, but it's a start.

Arrange the mic position so that the singer sings up” into the mic capsule. 2 to 4 inches above the mouth should work fine; the idea is that the singer should raise their chin an inch or two. Start off with the singer's mouth about 5″ - 6″ from the microphone (maybe a little closer with a dynamic mic). Every singer will be different, so a few passes checking out the level changes between loud and soft passages in the song will be needed. Remember that with most cardioid mics, the closer the singer is to the mic, more bass will be accentuated because of the proximity effect.

Always use a good pop shield between the singer and the microphone to prevent ‘b' and p' plosives. Although DIY stocking constructions can work ok, a decent pop shield is not expensive and worth having. Metal mesh shields are best, with fabric mesh a close second. Don't use foam wind covers: they're ineffective for pop suppression and attenuate higher frequencies. Position the shield so that it's about 3″-4″ from the mic — this also should be changed if the singer tends to get too close to the mic for quieter passages — use the position of the shield to make the singer keep his/her distance from the mic.

With some voices and microphones, sibilance can be a problem. Sibilance is the bright ‘hissing' noise made by consonants such as s,” t” c” and f.” To reduce sibilance with directional mics is to rotate it off-axis by a few degrees. This position reduces the high-frequency sensitivity of most mics a touch, and can help reduce problem sibilance. Around 15 degrees is enough. An off-axis placement also has the advantage of reducing popping. It is always better to spend time getting the vocals sounding good, with minimal pops and sibilance rather than try editing or de-essers later.

If you're recording a singer with a naturally ‘boxy' sound, or perhaps a singer with an obviously nasal tone, an omni or figure-8 patterned mic can help, although you may need to position the singer a little closer to the mic so that the direct sound of the voice is more prominent than the room effect.

For singers with wildly fluctuating levels, try using two mics, one more sensitive than other. Space them a few inches apart, angled in slightly, and have the vocalist sing into the space between the mics. Or use a similar mic (if available) and switch in the -10 or -20 dB pad on one of them. Record on separate tracks, and switch them at the editing/mixing stage later if needed.

Most mics and preamps have a bass roll-off filter, often at a set turnover frequency between 80 - 150 Hz. Use the most appropriate setting for the vocal, but use it.

A common question is Why do I see vocal mics positioned upside down?” Actually, there are two reasons: the first dates back 60+ years: one of the most used and famous microphones for vocals (along with the AKG C12) is the Neumann U47 tube mic, introduced just after WWII. This mic had the M7 PVC capsule, which had a tendency to dry out over time, and this deterioration was accelerated by heat. So it made sense to hang U47s upside down, as heat rises, so eliminating cooking the capsule over time. Another reason is that it's easier to get singers to sing ‘up' a little; singers are less likely to mess with a vocal mic height when it's suspended on a boom upside down than a mic on a stand right in front of them.

Once the mics were mounted upside down, another advantage became obvious; there was a benefit for the singer by getting the mic, stand, boom and cables out of the way, offering the singer a better view of a music stand for holding lyrics, hanging headphones and storing other items.

Scheduling

There used to be a tradition of leaving vocals to the end of recording projects, after most overdubs and extra sweetening had been completed. Not a great idea: singers can't be expected to sit around for days or weeks, and then pump out all their vocals in two or three days.

The number of hours you can expect to record vocals is limited, especially with heavier rock and metal. So it makes sense to scheduled vocal recording over as many days as possible, breaking up sessions into styles so that more melodic, less stressful, vocals are recorded first which serve as a warm up to attempt more aggressive parts. Depending on the length of your sessions, include a few days off too, particularly after a sessions where the singer's voice has been really stressed.

Some singers prefer to attempt capturing a continuous performance in longer takes, punching in corrective phrases or parts. If you're recording rock vocals with dynamics ranging from a whisper to a roar, try the dual microphone suggestion I mentioned above.

Microphone Choice

Experienced singers who have recorded often may know which microphones have worked well for them in the past. Ask, if you know that the singer has this depth of experience.

If your singer doesn't have a great deal of experience, then start by choosing a microphone with an inverse character to the singer's natural sound.

Every voice is different, and therefore there is no ‘perfect' vocal microphone. Most advice on recording vocals starts by telling you to use a large diaphragm condenser (LDC) microphone. Although often true, ‘often' isn't the same as ‘always.' If you have a singer (particularly female singers) with a thin, high, hard vocal sound, better results can be achieved using a dynamic microphone, or even a ribbon. An Electrovoice RE20 can be a great vocal mic, as can the Shure SM7B, and the lowly SM58 can sound great, paired with a good preamp.

Cheap LDC microphones often have a noticeable harshness at higher frequencies and therefore are exactly the wrong choice for this type of singer. The market is crowded with sub $1,000 LDC microphones, many of which have this unnatural harshness, although I tried an inexpensive Audix CX212 recently that was rather good. Among the many other reasonably priced, but premium, LDC microphone brands, Lauten Audio and Peluso are worth checking out.

Another variable is the material itself: having found the perfect mic for the first song, perhaps a rock song with wide dynamics and a belted-out chorus, don't assume that this should be the mic used throughout all vocal sessions. An appropriate choice for an intimate ballad may require a different microphone. Usually, two different mics will cover the range of vocal delivery. Some mics don't work as well with high vocal levels, as the timbre of vocal character changes with delivery.

Buying Microphones

If you're primarily recording just one singer, don't base your purchasing decision on reviews. Try out different microphones, and pick one that best suits your singer. Microphones are tricky to buy — online stores often won't accept microphone returns unless they have a defect. Visit a good pro audio dealer with a demo room and try out several mics. Or book an hour or two at a local studio with a decent mic cabinet, and try out their options, but use the same preamp with each test, so that you're comparing apples to apples.

If you're planning to record different, unknown singers, start with at least a good dynamic mic, and a large diaphragm condenser.

If you have a limited budget, spend money on a preamp first. A good preamp can make a basic mic sound good, but a crappy preamp can make a great mic sound far less impressive.

You can add to your mic collection as your budget expands, but it makes no sense to replace poor quality preamps.

Headphone Mix

The headphone mix that the singer hears is critical to achieve a great performance. A touch of reverb is often helpful as it creates a sense of space around the vocal, but ask the singer what they prefer.

The balance between the backing track and the vocal can influence the performance:

If the vocal is too loud in the headphones = flat notes — lower energy.

If the vocal is too soft in the headphones = sharp notes and a strained performance

If a singer is mostly flat, turn up the backing track in their phones a little without telling them. If the singer is mostly sharp, then turn the backing track down. This will help correct consistent, but small, pitch problems. If the singer is inconsistent; sometimes sharp, sometimes flat, then you have to do more work in helping the singer create the right performance. Remember though, the performance is the most important element: slight pitch issues are less important than a convincing, emotionally believable performance.

Take the time to set up your monitor mix so that you can easily adjust the mix so that you can immediately offer the singer changes to help; drums a bit louder to help timing issues, more keys or guitars to help with pitch, less bass or lead licks to help with focus , etc. Keep the headphone mix as simple as possible, and usually it's a good idea to pull out most of the sweetening and any parts which could be distracting, such as percussion with off rhythms.

Headphone choice is another consideration, and if your singer prefers ‘one ear off' that will lead you to a different mix. Closed back headphones are needed.

Recording Chain

Try to capture the character and performance of the vocal going to the computer (or tape) and forget about trying to create it in the mix. Editing and mixing vocal tracks should be the final touches to enhance an already good vocal track.

Audio interfaces contain preamps. Most of them are just OK, but are usually bland and can easily be bettered by a good, separate preamp.

For rock songs, I always use hardware compressors as part of recording chain because this type of material often needs more dynamic control before the signal gets to the analog-to-digital converters. For different types of music, you may decide that a compressor isn't needed. Unlike the days when we recorded to tape and wanted to get the best signal-to-noise ratio, and therefore wanted to record hefty levels to tape, modern digital recording has such a huge dynamic range when recording 24-bit that this isn't strictly necessary. However, I still choose to use hardware compression, but now not as much for dynamic control but rather because I like the coloration of the sound that different compressors impart. A compressed vocal in the headphones also benefits the singer; they feel less need to compensate dynamically.

Aim for 5-6 dB of gain reduction on the signal peaks, but don't overdo compression during recording—you can't remove it later. Start with a ‘not too fast' attack time, so the transients pass relatively unscathed, with medium release time. You'll need to experiment with your particular recording chain, singer and style of song.

One disadvantage of project studio recording is that there is less attention paid to the recording levels before the converters. I like riding a vocal fader during the recording, but to do this you'll need some type of outboard mixer. It then becomes simple to push/pull the vocal levels during the recording which results in a smoother recording, and less work to do at the editing/mixer stage. There are many small mixers available at reasonable cost, some of which have the audio interface and converters built-in, so that they connect to your DAW machine via FireWire or USB. If you're recording just with a DAW, be sure to set up your cue (foldback) monitoring sends so that they are sent pre-fade, so your adjustments to levels don't alter the headphone mix.

Encouragement and Criticism

The psychology of how to get the best performance out of a singer is much more important than microphone choice, preamps, compression or anything else to do with the technical aspects of recording. It's all about getting a singer to relax, and feel confident enough to give their very best performance, without feeling self-conscious. I have been a guest on many sessions where I cringed—not because of the recorded sound, but how thoughtless comments destroyed the mood of the session, and made the singer uncomfortable and doubt their performance. I have actually seen an engineer jump on to the talkback button and bark flat, do it again” at the first delivery of an iffy note. Moments later on another pass, this same idiot impatiently interrupted again by saying wrong again!” If it were my session, I would have fired the moron.

Be mindful that the singer is trying their hardest. Encouragement with gentle criticism pays dividends. Try to avoid comments where you're making comments containing don't.” Use positive reinforcement. Take frequent short breaks, offering the singer a chance to relax and listen back to their progress. Trying to record take after take can be confusing; it's hard for a singer to hear which parts of their performance need adjustment, so breaks, when a singer can review the takes so far, can help enormously.

Most singers prefer a relaxed environment, and don't want to feel that they are in a fishbowl. Turn down the lights, and get people out of the control room. Singers don't want the distraction of seeing band members appearing to be cracking jokes, having conversations, mixing cocktails or anything else unrelated to the vocal performance. Hearing a babble of background conversation each time the talkback button is pressed is another distraction.

Record everything. There's no such thing as a ‘practice' pass, particularly with DAW recording (multiple vocal tracking to tape can get more challenging). Often the best performance is achieved in early takes so make sure you've recorded them. Set up your DAW so each pass is automatically recorded to a new track.

Make Notes

Make notes of settings used in your hardware recording chain. Microphones settings such as LF cut and pad settings, preamp settings, compressor settings , etc. All will be very useful if you decide at a later stage to record or replace additional vocal parts. Also make these notes for any hardware you use at the mixing stage.

Editing and Mixing Vocals

For the purposes of this discussion, let's talk about a very simple scenario: assume that your goal is to have two separate tracks of vocals: one for the verses, and one for the choruses.

The verses are fairly constrained, but the choruses involve a much more aggressive vocal performance, where the singer's voice character (timbre) changes and the levels and vocal sound change considerably.

Comping Vocals

Once the recording stage is completed, you'll probably have multiple audio tracks of your vocals. You now will want to comp (to compile or to create a composite vocal track) vocal takes into the best comp'd track(s). You may want to keep sections of the vocals on separate tracks so that you can more easily apply processing and effects later, reducing the amount of automation and dynamic control needed, and corrective processes such as EQ which may not be needed on the entire completed vocal track. Remember that the comp should result in seamless vocal parts which do not sound disjointed. Often the individual phrases may not sound quite right when soloed, as you are auditioning out of context. Just remember to focus more on the continuity of the performance and not on all the details at this stage — we'll tackle the fine detail later.

Every DAW will have features for comping tracks, and they all work slightly differently but the result is the same; a new track is created, and parts from your vocal takes are placed on this new track, comping the best parts of all your takes. The unused parts are removed from the arrangement, but filed away in case they are needed later. See the section below though, as some out takes can be very useful for simulating double tracked vocals.

Destructive Editing

Once you have your comp'd vocal tracks, you may have residual problems to deal with. There may be noises, pops, mouth noises, breath sounds and unwanted level fluctuation between phrases.

There are two schools of thought here; some people always use automation for everything; others (like me) prefer to rely less on automation, but rather permanently editing the audio file. For me, it's easier to scoot through a file, selecting parts in a wave form editor, and eliminating noises, adding silence between phrases, reducing some breath sounds, interpolating pops and other minor fixes, and changing gain of entire phrases, than to make small adjustments manually by graphically changing automation. To me, it's just good housekeeping to have a smooth vocal track where I can use any additional compression mostly for sonic reasons rather than depending on automation and compression for too broad dynamic control.

Some dislike destructive editing as you really can't change your mind later (other than reverting to a backed up original file) but I actually like this supposed restriction; I like making decisions as early in the recording process as possible, only leaving minor instrumental parts open to tailor later, probably because I came from the old school analogue recording days using tape, when we had to make such choices as there was much less flexibility than in the present day digital domain, and when bouncing tracks down to create a comp'd track on a tape machine was commonplace, in order to free up more tracks for record additional parts. No going back in those days!

De-Essers

De-essing isn't much of a concern for me, as I believe that recording the vocal using the right microphone, position and hardware chain prevents the problem before it becomes an issue. However, if you record many different singers, or mix material where you had no control during the recording process, then think about investing in a used dbx 902 - the best de-esser made, hardware or software. They can be found quite inexpensively. You'll need a dbx 900 series rack to house the module, but they are not expensive, and gives you somewhere to house additional 900 series units such as the excellent 903 compressor (essentially a dbx 160 in a 900 module) ; also quite cheap and a great workhorse as a single channel compressor/limiter.

EQ

Hopefully, you have already record your vocals with a LF cut setting on the microphone set at 75 or 80 kHz, or an equivalent setting on your preamp. But your work on the low end of the spectrum probably isn't done. Listen to your vocal track in context, and see how much you can roll off at the low end. Don't do this with the track soloed: you'll think that the vocal is sounding too thin. But in with the mix, you'll be surprised how much low end you can remove. This will help make the vocal sit right in the mix, and is one step in cleaning up the low end, a common problem in mixes that have too little low end definition. This concept also applies to many other instruments — get rid of frequencies that aren't the focal point of that instrument's sound and stop too many instruments competing in the same frequency band.

Taking this idea one step further, try to cut frequencies rather than boosting them. Boominess is most apparent around 200-250 Hz. Instead of boosting mid range frequencies to attempt to make the vocal more present, try notching EQ around 230 Hz with a higher Q setting (every voice will be different) and then boost the vocal level.

Many vocals have their most obvious frequencies in the range from about 750 Hz to 2.8 kHz. Unfortunately, guitars are in the same range and turning up the vocal will just make the vocals sit on top of the guitars, not mixed in with guitars. A better approach is to EQ the guitar so that the guitar sound is scooped out where it's clashing with the vocals, using as narrow a ‘notch' as possible, the result being that the vocals now have their own space alongside the guitars but only in the competing range.

Another technique to try is compressing the guitars more when the vocal is present, using side-chain compression to affect the guitars. In my example above, use a send from the vocal track, heavily EQ's, so that the vocal being sent to the compressors side chain has a very limited frequency range, centered on the vocal's fundamental frequency. It won't sound good, but that doesn't matter as you're not hearing this vocal; its sole purpose is to control the compression of the guitars only for that frequency range.

If you're looking for a new tool for mixing, dynamic EQ is a very useful plug-in, combining an EQ and compressor with features enabling you to apply EQ only when the signal within a certain frequency range exceeds a certain loudness, as set by your threshold and filter. A good example of this is the Brainworx dynEQ

Compression

A compressor isn't intelligent, so it doesn't know when vocal dynamics are being changed for an intentional effect or because the singer wasn't adequately controlling the dynamics of their performance, or even didn't care and got caught up in the emotional delivery of their take. Often you want vocal dynamics. Your job is to ride the vocal levels (or automate) to preserve the dynamics you want, while smoothing out those which you don't.

A compressor can make a vocal ride properly within a dense mix and it is an indispensable tool to control peaks and bring average levels up. Compressors work much faster than you can, but for slow averaging of vocal dynamics, you will do a better, and smarter, job.

Don't ask your compressor to work too hard.

The more you do, the more obvious the artifacts will be, and depending on your compressor settings, you will make the compression noticeable, which is often not desirable. If, after you have tried the recording and editing tips described above, you still find that your vocal levels are not adequately controlled, try routing the output of your vocal track to a aux, and ride the vocal level to the aux, using automation to capture your moves. Now add final compression and other effects you want to the aux, not to the original vocal track.

Serial compression:

I use this technique all the time, and I think it's the most commonly overlooked technique regarding compression. Using two compressors can be very helpful, as you're making the two compressors to perform different tasks. Try using a fast FET-type compressor (such as an 1176 or software emulation) set to a fast attack, with the threshold (or input control in the case of an 1176) set so that only the peak signals are being compressed leaving the body of the vocal untouched. Aim for a gain reduction that sounds natural but firmly controls the peaks.

Now follow this with opto type compressor (an LA-2 or LA-3 type) with a slower attack and release, but this time set the threshold lower with more moderate ratio. This will level the vocal track nicely, and the two compressors together will give you a much smoother result.

Parallel Compression:

Often used on other instruments, particularly drums and guitars, a modified version of parallel compression can work great on vocals. Either duplicate those vocal parts you want to use this effect on, or send from the original vocal track to an aux channel. On the aux channel (or separate vocal FX track), add a great deal of EQ to boost presence and air, roll off the low end, and add obscene amount of compression. You now have two vocal tracks, one natural and one with heavy EQ and compression. Now set the natural vocal channel to it's appropriate mix level and bring up the FX vocal so it just peaks out under the unaffected vocal to add presence and excitement. Use the natural vocal channel for the send to reverb you might want. Set right, the vocal won't get lost in the mix, and although the unaffected vocal sounds natural there will be a presence and edge that can be a real benefit to your vocal mix.

See here for more details on compression and compressor types.

Vocal Tracking, ADT, Doubling, Thickening etc.

ADT (Artificial Double Tracking): Since the dawn of time (well, since The Beatles) double-tracking vocals is one of the most useful and commonly used effects. Double-tracked vocals are stacking the same vocal twice (sometimes more) to thicken the vocal sound. This can also work very well on backing vocals.

The best results will be obtained by doing it for real, getting the singer(s) to duplicate their part on another track. However, it's a laborious process. Getting the two vocals to be tight enough can be quite difficult, particularly if the original is more of a creative interpretation than a technically consistent performance. Where words start or end on hard consonant sounds, such T” or C,” the doubling result can sound sloppy. Some singers are really good at it, others are not. Either way, it can be a time-consuming and demanding process.

You'd think that it would be easy to recreate the ADT effect easily using modern technology. Just adding a digital delay to the vocal at the same level as the original part, with a delay time of 40-100 ms and no feedback should do it, right? Not really.

When ADT was first created at Abbey Road, the technique involved two tape machines; one playing back the original vocal to another tape machine, which then recorded and played back the delayed vocal in to another channel on the mixing console, the delay time being changed by use of vari-speed control on the second tape machine. Because tape was being used, with two machines, variations were being introduced several times along the process. Tape machines have wow, flutter and scrape flutter, each of which introduces slight changes to the delayed vocal. Add to this the addition of harmonic distortion introduced by the delayed vocal being passed through three stages of signal electronics, and the characteristics of tape itself, all of which introduces undefinable ‘analog warmth' and the end result is just not the same as slapping on a digital delay.

However, its possible to get close enough for all but the most critical ears. There are various plug-ins which claim to simulate this quite well, but they are mostly expensive. I've had some success by using VacuumSound's ADT plug-in coupled with a distortion/warmth unit like a Culture Vulture Alternative plug-ins such as PSP's Vintage Warmer can help too.

Additional, a fast compressor taming the peaks to soften hard consonants, or even an envelope shaper, can make the tracked vocal sit better with the original. Melodyne's offset by random pitch and time is another additional process worth trying.

Dual Shifter:

Another favorite. Older Eventide hardware like the h3000 had a dual shifter setting. This can be recreated by standard plug-ins. First, copy your vocal track twice. On copy 1, insert a compressor (opto type) with a low ratio and the threshold set so that the compressor is working on all but the quietest parts. Follow this with a pitch shifter, pitching the vocal down by 10 - 15 cents. Now add a digital delay, initially set to something like 10 - 50 ms. On copy 2, insert a fast FET or VCA type compressor with a fast attack, higher ratio, with the threshold set so that it's only working on the peaks. Add a pitch shifter again, this time pitching up 10 - 15 cents. Once again, add a digital delay, but this time set to a different delay than copy 1. Route the outputs of these two copies to a submix, panned L - R, where you can apply further compression if needed, together with EQ further removing low-end mud, and perhaps adding a little presence. Tweak these suggested ‘starting point' settings to taste.

Whisper track:

Here's a tip for an effect which may be useful on slow, more intimate verses, especially ballads. Ask your singer to whisper, almost talking, along with the vocal track, often in a lower register, compress it, and bring this up so it's barely audible under the lead vocal.

Reamping:

Usually used for guitars and keyboard tracks, this can be very useful for really hard edged, tough vocals in hard rock or metal mixes. It can add lots of distortion and a great live sound to a vocal. Send your vocal track out to a recording room via a reamp box, or at a pinch, a passive DI box in reverse. Use this send as an input to a guitar amp, and close mic it. Also, add a room mic and compress it. Record these two new tracks, and mix them to taste under your lead vocal. As there's really nothing useful coming out of a guitar amp above about 4.5 kHz, you'll find that mixed right, it can add a lot of edge and aggression into your vocals.

Reverb

Washy vocal reverb has become less fashionable in recent years, compared to pop/rock music production of the classics from the 70's and 80's. But there are many exceptions. The current trend is to use reverb to create a little space around the vocal, but not much that it's an obviously applied reverb effect.
Unlike recording orchestral music or recordings of ensembles in folk, jazz or MOR, I find that the use of convolution reverbs are less useful in pop/rock/metal genres. Convolution reverbs use a ‘fingerprint' of an actual space and mix it (or convolve) your vocal with that space, creating the impression that your singer's vocal was recorded in that space.

The downside of using convolution reverbs is that the IRs (the Impulse Response files used to convolve with the vocal) are less flexible and offer fewer options to create a suitable reverb sound. So I often prefer to use digital reverb units which use algorithms to create synthetic effects. These are purely mathematical calculations where every part of the reverb effect is freely adjustable and you can tailor exactly the vocal reverb you want. Lexicon is the best known and most used manufacturer of all digital algorithm-based reverbs since the 70's.

For a lead vocal, I'd suggest starting with a short reverb time (well under 2 secs), and a pre-delay around 40 - 60 ms and boost the early refections part of the parameters depending on the reverb device you're using. It's not possible to give hard-and-fast recommendations; you'll need to experiment. I've always been a lover of the EMT 140 fbST plate for vocals (the real one!) but some digital reverbs (the original 224XL Rich Plate that carried through the Lexicon PCM series) are all very good.

In software emulations, the UAD Plate 140 is good, and the recently introduced Lexicon Native plug-ins are superb. Unlike many software emulations of hardware, reverb plug-ins work extremely well, as in reality the hardware digital reverbs are really just giant calculators, with little or no significant analogue component coloration, so their algorithms can be calculated just as well with modern computers, although the CPU requirements can be considerable; a good reason to have one or more hardware units if your budget permits.

The usual method of using reverb is to insert your reverb on an aux (containing either routing to external hardware or your reverb plug-in) and send to it from your vocal(s) tracks.

Increase your return levels until you can just hear the effect, and then back off a touch. As mentioned earlier, this is merely a starting point; adjust the pre-delay, and reverb time to fit your mix, and don't worry too much about the finer digital delay parameters. You will probably need to EQ the send to your reverb, and often the return, by removing anything under at least 100 Hz and treat other areas of your reverb to removing any annoying resonances and notch out any unwanted frequency bands.
Try altering the reverb time between the different sections of your song. In rock music, start by making it shorter for verses and longer for the choruses. Generally you'll have verses and chorus parts on different tracks, so you can use multiple reverb unit instances if you're using plug-ins, as reverb plug-ins in particular are challenging to automate when altering certain parameters such as reverb times. If you're using hardware, but only one unit, you'll have to record the effect returns for parts using differing hardware settings.

Background Vocals

There are many techniques for recording, editing and mixing background vocals ().

Start by applying the same editing and mixing techniques as suggested earlier for lead vocals. Your first task is to clean up the individual vocal parts. Most often, you're looking to create a blended, smooth sound for these vocals.

Here's an approach I like using:

Panning:

Keep your out of the way of your lead vocal, which is almost always panned dead center. Start by panning them at 10 'clock and 2 'clock. I prefer to leave the extreme hard left, hard right positions for any effects returns. Having said that, I have found occasionally that panning the backing vocals hard left-right can work, returning effects to your mix with a narrower stereo spread.

Low End EQ:

Just as we removed low end from the lead vocals, you should do the same here. But this time, while listening to your in context, move your low cut turnover frequency up until your start to noticeably thin out. Then back off a touch. Soloed, these vocals will sound way too thin, but will work fine in the mix. It's important to make sure your don't muddy-up low end guitar and keyboard parts, as well as clouding the space used by your bass parts.

Compression:

By now you should have applied broad level control manually to your parts. Next step is to beat them unmercifully into a blend, where individual transients and untamed peaks are ruthlessly stamped on. Perhaps this is one area of mixing where you can forget subtlety; squash those vocal peaks! Fast attack, high ratio is the order of the day, with the threshold set so that peaks are heavily controlled.

Submix:

Route the outputs of all your tracks to a stereo bus, maintaining pan position, and with the correct mix of your parts. This single fader aux will control your overall level. Leave it alone for now. You'll probably need to make multiple passes throughout your mix, automating the balance between the various parts. Usually, I do this by grabbing automated faders in ‘touch' mode and will go in to the individual tracks afterwards, smoothing out automation points and correcting any mistakes.

Once you have all your individual levels set, the next step is to apply some ‘glue' to further smooth out and blend your Start by inserting a stereo bus compressor (hardware or software) on your aux, and set it (as a starting point) with a low ratio (2:1 or less as a start), not too fast attack, low-ish threshold, medium release and aim for gain reduction in the 3-4 dB range, adjusting the threshold until this is achieved. Continue playing through the song, adjusting the release value until it's smooth and seamless.
Almost there!

Now you want to apply some EQ, if necessary, to create a space for the lead vocal if the parts occur at the same time as the lead vocal. If they only occur occasionally, apply the side-chain compression or dynamic EQ techniques as described earlier, but using the lead vocal as the control signal. If the overlap the lead vocals often, then apply the EQ scooping technique described above so that the EQ is notched in the lead vocal's range — it won't take much to make quite a difference. In any event, you should use this additional processing only if you have trouble riding the levels in the mix.

Depending on your set up, you can send from the aux to another aux for reverb and other effects. On some , particularly on slower, more intimate material, a chorus effect can work well on mixed in to taste, as well as before the reverb send. I particularly like Fluid , from Audio Damage, although there are many on the market, and if you have access to Lexicon or Eventide hardware, they're unbeatable. ADT and dual shifter effects (see above) can also work well on , as well as many effects normally used for lead vocals. Again, experiment after you've cleaned up your basic tracks.

Vocal Balance

Vocals not sitting well in the mix is one of the commonest questions around the audio recording forums. Hopefully, some of the above suggestions will help, but as a final note, it's important to listen to your mix, as it evolves, on a variety of playback systems. Often, too loud or too quiet vocals will be easier to judge at very low playback levels, as well as playing your mixes back on small crappy speakers, simulating the environment in which your song is most likely to be played. Also try playing back your mix and stand outside the mix room, and play back your mix on other devices, including your car and all the iGadgets. Listen to commercial mixes of the same genre and see how your vocal balance and sound stand up.

Finally, when you commit to your mix, take the time to create additional, and clearly noted, alternative mixes with the lead vocal up a little on one, and down a little on another. A Little” depends on your particular song, but 1 or 2 dB should be plenty. When you get to the mastering stage, the additional, overall, mastering processing needed may affect your vocal balance and it can be a lifesaver to have alternative mixes available, identical other than the vocal level. Creating separations for mastering can be even more useful.

Panning Techniques For Mixing. Are Asymmetrical Mixes Weird

When mixing a song there are an infinite number of ways to put together the stereo field or the left to right image across the speakers. When I am working with mixing clients, or training others to do mixing, one of the topics that often comes up is the idea of symmetry or left-right balance. If there is a guitar panned to one side, is there another guitar on the other side of the mix so it does not feel lopsided? This always leads to the question of whether or not left-right balance is something important that we should strive for. Won't it sound weird if we have something on one side without something to balance it on the other side?”

The answer to this is not as straightforward as it might seem. If we look at mixes from some of the great mixers, we will find that many do have almost perfect balance between the left and right side in terms of both arrangement as well as spectral balance. What I mean by spectral balance” is that they seem to have an equal amount of each frequency range on the left and right side of the mix. Check out this Green Day mix as a near perfect example of this. Except for the fact that the hi-hat is panned to the left side, the general sound of the left and right side are virtually identical.

But as we start to listen to a wider range of mixes we will also find the complete opposite. Check out this mix for U2 in which most of the song has a single guitar hard panned to the left side with absolutely nothing to balance it” on the right side.

In the last few decades the norm has been to pan the bass, kick drum, snare and main vocals straight up the middle, but what happens with the other elements is all over the map. We can find examples of very balanced symmetrical mixes as well as completely lopsided mixes. What can we take away from this?

You may have a strong feeling that mixes should have a strong left-right balance, but music fans do not care at all!

It is all just a matter of mood and personal preference. I tend to do both fairly often. Sometimes it is just letting the muse dictate where things should go, but often if I am making a mix asymmetrical it is because I want a particular instrument to stand out or have more presence in a mix. When a guitar (or any other instrument) sits alone on one side of a mix without a complimentary” instrument on the other side it will generally have more personality and connect with the listener in a more direct way. Instruments with left-right counterparts will tend to blend in as part of the ensemble. Another positive aspect of this is that when a primary instrument is set off to one side without an opposite counterpart, it will often compete less with the main vocal in the middle. While one is not better than the other, it is pretty obvious that both are completely valid.

One of the great tools we have available to us in mixing is to experiment with panning and see how it affects the overall feel of the mix, and even experiment with muting parts that have multiple versions of the same instrument/part to feature the part more. Regardless of what you do, the important thing is to mix in a way that you feel is best for the music because music lovers do not really care about anything else.

Here are a few more examples of some great lopsided mixes.

The entirety of Van Halen I

One fairly common mixing technique you will find is a trick where the mix will be fairly balanced in one section and then completely asymmetrical in another. This helps build a sense of dynamics even in very compressed recordings. Check out this John Mayer tune as an example.

Here is Lenny Kravitz doing the same thing

There are some days I actually miss the 70's and 80's not as often as one might imagine and some part of that nostalgia is in panning.

I can tell in a matter of seconds what decade a song was recorded in because as it happens my truck is missing the left side of the stereo mix and the difference between the decades is so very obvious. Starting somewhere in the mid 80's stereo mono” became the norm. Don't even need a left/right channel mix. One speaker pretty much gets it all. But then a Beatles tune comes on. Wow! If your readers haven't tried it—Listen to Abbey Road with one side turned off. A real eye opener.

And I love listening to Eddie Van Halen's rhythm playing on the first album. All the leads are on one side. Of course, you're stuck with David's vocals but the songs aren't all that long.

10 Quick Drum Recording Tips

Heading in to the studio to lay down drum tracks? Follow these ten tips to help the whole process go smoothly.

Skins, sticks and beaters

It's much easier to get volume, clarity and brightness from a new set of drumheads. If possible, get them on, tuned and 'played in' a day or two before the session. Different types of head give different types of sound: single- ply heads are bright with less sustain (jazz/ pop); two-ply heads are deeper and more controlled (rock/metal); coated heads are warmer in tone (disco/70s). Your choice of sticks or hotrods and felt or wood kick drum beaters will also have a big effect on the sound of the kit. Get close to the sound you want before you think about microphones!

Tune up

This should be the drummer's responsibility. Here are a few tuning tips and things to check if you're having problems. Check that the head diameter is exactly right (fractionally larger than the drum) and that it's mounted perfectly centrally. Always make tension adjustments in opposite pairs to avoid forcing the head off-centre. Seat the head by applying gentle pressure with your palm to the centre, then tune out any new wrinkles that appear.

Bottom heads on toms

Wherever there are two heads, there are three possibilities. If you tune the bottom (resonator) head of a tom to the same pitch as the top (batter) head, you'll get a purer tone with more sustain - perfect for jazz and its derivatives. If you tune the resonator lower, you get a slight pitch drop-off and less decay - great for rock. Tuning the resonator higher shortens the decay further, which can be great for close miking. A good starting interval for the difference in pitch between heads is a minor third - ie, three semitones either way.

Front head on the kick or not?

The front (resonator) skin on the kick drum is important for creating a good, meaty tone. Jazzers love it, and most rock/poppers have a hole cut in it to allow microphones and dampening material (a small blanket, say) to be placed inside. For metal styles, where you're mainly looking for click and thud, you may as well just remove the front head so that you can get a mic right in on the beater point.

Tighten the kick drum

It's possible to create a little kick drum chamber using, blankets, duvets or even a coat. These are draped over the kick drum, and any microphones are placed in and in front of it. Use a couple of small mic stands to hold the blankets up. The chamber prevents spill from the cymbals and snare getting into the kick drum mics, making it easier to boost the high frequencies at the mix stage and thus enhance the 'clickiness' without adding harshness from the cymbals.

Playing to a click

If you're tracking to an existing recording, you may need to be able to play to a click track. The best drummers are able to sit exactly on the click, but tend to flow around it in order to create a better feel. Recording to a click makes it much easier to edit between drum takes at a later stage. If the whole band is tracking together, it's best if only the drummer gets the click. Using a little beatbox or percussion groove usually makes a better 'click' than an actual click, and will also spill over into the microphones less.

Prepare the click for gaps

Prepare for stops and gaps in the song by automating the level of the click in the headphones. During the stops, lower the volume so that there's no click spill into the drum mics from the headphones. If you're recording the whole band, it's also a good idea to send a click to the other players at that point, so you don't have to count everyone back in. This will save lots of painful editing and remedial work later on.

Get a crappy mic

Tape recorders used to come with built-in condenser or electret microphones. Put one of these old machines into record/pause mode and take the output into your DAW for an exciting, super-crunchy sound. Sometimes, rubbishy old battery-powered mics can sound good too. Put these types of mic in a place where they can hear the whole kit. The corners of the room can offer interesting results - experiment!

Record without cymbals

Recording a kit in a difficult space without ideal equipment can be a fruitful and rewarding experience, but you might still feel that your results sound amateurish. One of the classic drum sound problems is too much cymbal spill. This happens in the best of studios, and when it does, the pros just record the crashes afterwards. That way you can bring up all the exciting roominess of the drums themselves in the mix, then blend in perfectly recorded cymbals afterwards. As long as they share the same buss compressor no one will ever know (although drummers will hate playing without cymbals).

Essential gubbins for a trouble-free drum session

Moon Gel, for damping; 3-in-1 oil, for squeaky pedals; a drum key, because the drummer will forget theirs; an adjustable spanner, for rattly stands; gaffer tape, for holding stuff; masking tape, for attaching damping materials and the like; empty cigarette packets and J-Cloths, for that '70s sound; blankets; stage weight or sandbag; and Japanese cooking chopsticks - great for tom parts!

How To Get The John Bonham Drum Sound

There is no greater truth in making records than this: "The recording is governed by the performance." This may seem obvious, but many times the implications of this are not. There are two main areas where this truth manifests itself. The first is in the emotional impact of the music and the second is in the sonic signature or sonic possibilities of a recording.

Even with the best gear in the world or fancy recording techniques, the heart and soul of a recording is the emotion and the feel of a performance, and of course the songs. When I have discussions with musicians about production and they begin to confuse production with "great drums sounds", I tell them that good production is about getting the songs and the performances to a point where the drum sound does not matter, and then getting great drum sounds. Many of the recordings that are classics in the history of rock, pop and jazz actually sound quite bad when compared to other records of the same era or many records of today. Some of these recording are marred by unintentional distortion, poor mic technique and downright awful drum sounds, but these classics still stand up on the radio next to modern multimillion dollar productions because the songs and the performances are great. A great song and a great performance will transcend any limitations of "sound quality".

In my career I have had the pleasure of working with many performers that I consider brilliant and monumental. I will often get compliments on the sound of these recordings. While I am grateful for the appreciation, I always know that with some of these performers, I could have hit record on a boom box in the middle of a room and it would have been a great recording.

Much of being a producer is like being a cheerleader and a coach at a basketball game. My job is to find ways to inspire the team and help develop strategies to reach the end goal, but ultimately it is the players on the field that are going to win or loose the game. Fancy editing or postproduction tricks can make the game look more slick on TV, but it won't change the fact that it was a dull game and pur team lost. Jimi Hendrix was like Muhammad Ali at his prime: a fantastic athlete full of style and charisma. If you look at old TV footage from the 60s or 70's of Ali, with production values that pale by today's television standards, its still exciting. The same is true for Hendrix. Listen to a poorly recorded live concert and its him! Its Hendrix with all the fire and passion that is his legacy. All the trickery and experimentation on the studio albums only gives us new insight into his vision, but the heart of records is great songs and great "left hook" performances.

I was recently mixing some back catalog material from the 70's for the band, King Crimson. The task at hand, in addition to presenting unedited versions of songs that had been previously edited to fit on vinyl, was to improve the sound quality of the previous mixes. While I was able to make mixes stand up next to a more current sonic standards and give the listener a new perspective on this classic music, the real heart, soul and validity of the records was in the energy and passion that the musicians brought to great songs. Mixing the records for the King Crimson "ProjeKcts" was another interesting example of this. Engineer, Ken Latchney, approached the recording of the tours in a way that from night to night, the sounds on tape were very consistent, almost identical, so that when we mixed the live album we could combine performances from different nights into one cohesive album. When it came time to mix the album, some nights would sound fantastic and almost mix themselves and other nights just did not sound so good and took a lot of effort to mix. The actual sounds on tape from night to night were consistent, but the performances of the band from night to night made all the difference in the world. When the band was hot, the sound jumped out of the speakers and on an off night, all the studio tricks in the book could not make it "sound good".

As a young self-taught producer, I had not fully grasped how much recordings were governed by performance. The sound quality of my recordings were inconsistent, and I could not figure out why some sessions "I" managed to get it right and other sessions "I" got it so wrong. Why did some records sound really good and others not when I was using my same bag of tricks and the same equipment in the same studio. What experience finally taught me was that on some sessions I got lucky and had great players, and other sessions I failed to recognize what I needed to draw out of the players to make a great sounding record. I began to learn this when I would be mixing a record and the drummer would say to me that he wanted the drums to sound like AC/DC or some other great rock band. Try as I might, I could not get the drums to sound like AC/DC and finally I realized the obvious. Beyond the differences in recording techniques, I had the wrong materials to build the house the drummer was looking for. The building blocks of the AC/DC sound are Phil Rudd hitting straight, simple, hard and right in the pocket. The records in question I was doing had a drummer playing much more like a jazz drummer than Phil Rudd. I was trying to build a brick house out of crystal. Crystal will make you a fine jazz chandelier, but it won't build you an AC/DC style brick house.

Many of the recording or mix techniques you use in the studio to capture the spirit and energy of one style of playing will actually work against another style of playing. If a musician or producer is going for a particular sound on a record, that sound is built on the performance. If the performance is wrong there is nothing that will get you to where you want to go.

You could never take a performance by Tommy Lee on a Motley Crue record and make it sound like Elvin Jones on a Coltrane record or visa versa. The sound of a record is governed by the performance.

Over the years I have produced a lot of rock records where the comment has inevitably come up that the "drums should sound like John Bonham". I worked on several of these albums and tried to bring to the records some of the elements I understood to be "Bonham-esque": the deep kick drum, and the big sounding compressed room mics and in almost every case this approach did not serve the records as we hoped and we ending up going for a different approach. So I decided to set out and do some academic research. What exactly was the Bonham drums sound and what was the secret to making that drum sound work on records. The result of my research, published here for the first time in Fuse magazine.... drum roll please..... John Bonham plays drums on those records!

As I type this column, disc three of the Zeppelin box set is on the CD player and "achilles last stand", my favorite Zep song of all time is blasting away in the background. The recording of the drums sound very different from "when the levee breaks", which proceeded it or "Dancing Days" which proceeded that. And everything on the disc sounds very different from my bad VHS copy of the film "the song remains the same" which I taped off VH1 in 1989. Different locations, different engineers, different years, and completely different mix styles, but the interesting thing is that they all have that "Bonham drum sound". The credit for a catalog of beautiful sounding records certainly goes to Jimmy Page's production and the great engineers that found ways to capture the power and beauty of Bonham's playing on those albums, but the credit for the Bonham drum sound ultimately goes to Bonham.

The only reason I have chosen drummers to pick on, is because they are the most clear example of how performances affect the sound, but they are certainly not the only ones. I recently did a record where the guitarist was wondering why his guitars did not sound like the guitars on a Tool or Metallica record in the mix. The answer was simple: He was playing more like Neil Young than James Hetfield.

All other factors being equal, better performances will always "sound" better, and bad performances will never sound all that good. When a drummer and bass player finally lock into a groove, the kick drum sounds better. When a singer really gets the emotion of a song, the vocals sound better. When an orchestra gets the feel of composition, the whole group sounds better. Music is ultimately about communication. Regardless of the stationary we write a letter on, its what we write and how we say it that matters. Shakespeare on a paper bag is still great literature, and leather bound pulp fiction is still just pulp fiction. But a leather-bound collection of Shakespeare, now that's something!

Vocal 60s 70s Narrow Filtering

Martin - and his engineers, like Geoff Emerick and Phil McDonald, were indeed fans of hpf. They - along with other engineers who followed suite at the time, realized that there wasn't much point in adding frequencies below that which the particular instrument - namely vocals but not limited to just these - could reproduce.

Keep in mind that they were also using some very nice OB processing - Fairchilds, UA's, etc., and common mics used were Telefunkens, Neumanns, AKG's and other hi end condenser, dynamic and ribbon models...and then adding to this quality chain the console electronics.... beefy, warm pres and electronics by manufacturers like API, and well, you've got some serious game.

Many engineers at the time were also innovators of processing. There was a process named "ADT" or, automatic double tracking, that rumor says was invented by the cats at Abbey Road. These guys were very smart, and in many cases, if a particular processor or filter was wanted or needed and not available, they would actually design and build what they needed.

I'm not quite sure I get your question.

There's no specific recipe for sounding like somebody else.. You can't transform your voice to sound like an other.

I mean, creating a sound is a lot more complex than what EQ setting I'll use !!

It starts with how the room sound and how the singer's vocal cords actually sound. Then the choice of mic/preamp, wires, recording unit (analog/digital tape or converters/computers).

All those steps between the creation of the sound/signal and final cut will change or forge how the vocal track sounds. So no EQ setting will be the same. If it's recorded properly, maybe no EQ will be needed!

The best investment we can do as audio engineer is to train our ears.

Being able to recognize what needs to be done to get the sound we want with the gear at hand is the most important thing. And your ears should be the first tool to use. You can turn knobs all day, but your ears need to recognize when it sounds right!

As for a phase trick try this one :

As stated, HPF is your friend. The top end "softness", and some of the compression you alluded to, was the result of the medium -tape

I believe that the bandwidth (800-1.5K) you stated was a bit wider than that, though. Consoles varied a lot, but the EQ was , in most cases, a simpler affair,

Universal Audio has now released the "Abbey Road" emulations of some of the 'special' boxes used in their production chains. while this may not get you any closer to what you want to hear, they are examples of the tools used. One of the special things about EMI and Abbey Road was the presence of an on-site engineering staff who could build devices for specific needs. How many secret little filters, limiters, types of compressors, bandwidth dependent thingys they had will always haunt the minds of engineers and producers seeking that sound. The fact that you can only get close, if even that much, is the barrier. The brilliance of ALL of the factors representing the recording and production of Beatles and others from those studios continues to this day. There simply was nothing that sounded like those rooms. Some would point out the negatives of this sound but in reality we were then, as now, listening to the opening salvos of what became modern recording techniques for rock and pop music which continues to this day. Without the ground breaking done there producing the Beatles, who knows where the business would have gone.

Lenn Page started EMI's Recording Engineer Development Department (REDD) in 1955. in 1958 they developed the REDD37 to accommodate 4 track recording.

the37 was powered exclusively by Siemins V72 tube amps. soon after (within a year) the REDD51 was introduced which used lower noise REDD47 amps. Abbey Road acquired their first REDD51' in 1963. this leaves the question was it a REDD37 or a REDD51 which they used for most of their recordings post 1963?

four51's were built and they were used until 1968 when Abbey Road phased them out in favor of the newer solid state 8 and 16 track TG series consoles. the album "Abbey Road" was recorded using the TG console. Geoff Emrik said he had trouble getting the same tone for Pauls bass using the TG.

the Beatles also recorded at Trident on a Trident A Range and Olympic studios on a Helios board on some recordings they released. They also had two green Helois boards at Apple Studios so it can be said they recorded with Trident and a Helios boards also.

Recording Nick Drake.

Nick Drake recorded barely two hours worth of music in his career and sold fewer than 30,000 records when he was alive. Yet since his death in 1974 of an accidental prescription drug overdose his songs have kept circulating via soundtracks, covers and the Internet and gradually gained the success, influence and acclaim that eluded him in his short lifetime.

Some of his earliest recordings stem from his time at Cambridge University when fellow student Robert Kirby recorded several of Nick's songs onto a stereo tape recorder in the Spring of 1968. Robert would use these tapes to write arrangements for the songs with strings and woodwind to be performed in College. A four track demo recorded in a college room in the spring of 1968, was played to Joe Boyd, who had the Witchseason Label, licensed through Island records and Joe offered him a management, publishing, and production contract on the strength of these demos.

"Of all the albums I ever made, the two I produced by Nick are the ones I'm most proud of. I listen to them often because he was extraordinarily good - nothing he ever did was less than striking, and he had the gift of writing melodies of incredible beauty". Joe Boyd

The recording of his first album, Five Leaves Left had began while Nick was still in college, skipping lectures to attend the studio sessions in London. One session was in Morgan but the rest of his recordings would be produced at Sound Techniques Studio in Chelsea. He soon left Cambridge, nine months before graduation, and in the autumn of 1969 moved to London to concentrate on his career as a musician.

Sound Techniques Studio

Sound Techniques Studio was situated near to Chelsea's King's Road at the end of a small alley on 46a Old Church Street. It was originally part of an early 18th-century dairy and opened in the summer of 1965.

Although the studio started by recording a wide variety of musical genres it has become renowned for a catalogue of English folk rock from the late 60s to the mid 70s. This includes all three of the Nick Drake albums, Sandy Denny, Fairport Convention, Jethro Tull, Steeleye Span, Incredible String Band, The Pentangle, John and Beverley Martyn, Richard Thompson, Martin Carthy and Judy Collins. It was also the place that produced the early Pink Floyd records and albums and singles for John Cale, The Yardbirds, Focus and The Who.

So how did they achieve the Nick Drake sound?

According to engineer John Wood they just put a mic in front of him and let him play. Although there may be a lot of truth in this statement there are other factors involved. Let's look at the recording chain for River Man.

Producer - Joe Boyd. Engineer - John Wood.

It's starts off with a great player with a precise style and technique. There seems to be much speculation about what guitar he actually used for recordings but the general consensus is that he used a Guild M-20 but others seem to remember him playing a Martin

The next part is the acoustic space. Sound Techniques Studio had a high ceiling in the centre section and two lower ceiling sections either side beneath the control room and the workshop. This provided a large diffuse and varied acoustic space. The fifteen string players used on the track sat in a semicircle around Nick Drake and the track was recorded live with no over dubs.

A lot of studios of the time were very dead, but Sound Techniques wasn't and that made it quite special. The artists were very organic - there was nothing remotely manufactured about any of them - and it had a character that suited their work"- Jerry Boys

A Neumann U67 was used for the vocal and placed close to the singer's mouth. The guitar was close mic'ed in front of the sound hole using a Neumann KM56.

Neumann KM56

Neumann U67

Fairchild 660

The mics went through the Sound Techniques desk to an Ampex 4-track half inch tape machine. The desk circuits were transformer coupled, discrete transistor with inductor based eq. The vocal was compressed through a Fairchild 660 limiter. Delay would be added using an Ampex 2 track and reverberation with an EMT plate.

In early studio sessions Nick used Richard Hewson as an orchestrator, but his unhappiness with the results led him back to colleague Robert Kirby for most future arrangements. The one exception on Five Leaves was River Man, arranged by veteran composer Harry Robinson.

'Five Leaves Left' was recorded to Ampex 4- track,

'Bryter Layter' was 8- track. 3M Series 400

'Pink Moon' was 16-track Studer (although only four-to-five tracks were utilised)

Pink Moon

He arrived at midnight and we started. It was done very quickly. After we had finished I asked him what I should keep, and he said all of it, which was a complete contrast to his former stance. He came in for another evening and that was it. It took hardly any time to mix, since it was only his voice and guitar, with one overdub only. Nick was adamant about what he wanted. He wanted it to be spare and stark, and he wanted it to be spontaneously recorded." John Wood

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.