I was visiting London a few weeks ago and on a slow day decided to do the Beatles walking tour (which was inevitably called the Magical Mystery Tour”). The tour of course ended at the legendary Abbey Road Studios in northwest London, and I got to see no fewer than six tourists nearly get killed stepping directly into oncoming traffic while trying to catch the iconic crosswalk photo.
Modern music fans usually don't listen to music live, unlike our ancestors, who listened to live music exclusively. As I stood outside Abbey Road Studios and watched a 16-year-old Colombian girl weep at the site where the likes of Golden Slumbers,” A Day in the Life,” and All You Need Is Love” were recorded, I realized that a musical tour of the world — a tour of the songs that moved you to tears, or helped you through a hard time, or amped you up for a big moment — would actually be a tour of the studios, these often nondescript buildings that are typically hidden in plain sight in our cities. Here are some of the world's greatest studios.
Abbey Road Studios
The studio itself doesn't stand out particularly from the rest of the buildings around it, and it sits in a fairly quiet posh northwestern London suburb. If it weren't for the tourists crowding the crosswalk and the Beatles-related graffiti covering its outer gate, one might pass and never notice it. The most famous image of Abbey Road is of course the crosswalk right outside the studio. Vehicles in London are legally required to wait at so-called zebra crossings” as long as you physically stay in motion, so you can take as long as you like taking your picture, as long as you move in slow motion.
Aside from most of the Beatles albums, Abbey Road (formerly EMI Studios) is also the recording site of Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), Duran Duran's eponymous debut album (1981), parts of Radiohead's The Bends (1995) and OK Computer (1997), and Lady Gaga's Born This Way (2011).
The Dungeon
The Dungeon is probably better known for the hip-hop collective that was born out of it, the Dungeon Family. The Dungeon itself was a studio in producer Rico Wade's mother's basement in Atlanta, Georgia, but the collective has included some of the greatest hip-hop acts of the South and, consequently, of all time.
At the top left is the only picture I've been able to find of the Dungeon — pictured in it are the Dungeon Family and production-company founders of Organized Noize, Sleepy Brown, Ray Murray, and Rico Wade (from left to right). Probably the most famous members of the Dungeon Family are Big Boi and Andre 3000 (bottom left). Virtually all of Outkast's albums were recorded with the Dungeon Family. It's also the home of Gnarls Barkley, Cee-Lo Green, Bubba Sparxxx, Janelle Monae, and Future (pictured to the right with a Dungeon Family tattoo on his forearms).
Muscle Shoals may be best known for a song that wasn't recorded at Muscle Shoals: Lynyrd Skynyrd's Sweet Home Alabama.” One of the lines is Now Muscle Shoals has got the Swampers / And they been known to pick a song or two.” Muscle Shoals was formed when a band, the Muscle Shoals Sound Rhythm Section (nicknamed the Swampers) broke away from the great FAME Studios nearby and formed their own. While they've got a slightly bigger studio these days, it's still in the tiny town of Muscle Shoals, way off the beaten path in northwestern Alabama.
Even though the original studio looked like a roadside mechanic's garage, the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio would go on to record tracks for the likes of the Rolling Stones (Brown Sugar” and Wild Horses” from Sticky Fingers in 1971), Paul Simon's Kodachrome” (1973), Bob Seger's Night Moves (1976), the Black Keys' awesome Brothers (2009, at the new studio), and, of course, Lynyrd Skynyrd's first album (but not released till much later), Skynyrd's First (1978).
Trident Studios
It's hard to understate how important London studios were to rock ‘n' roll in the '60s and '70s, and high among those studios was Trident. Tucked back in an alley in London's posh Soho neighborhood, Trident is barely noticeable from the street, and it takes a little bit of searching to even realize it's a studio.
Relative anonymity aside, Trident Studios were responsible for the discovery of Queen and their first four albums, Queen (1973), Queen II (1974), Sheer Heart Attack (1974), and A Night at the Opera (1975), as well as James Taylor's eponymous debut album (1968), the Rolling Stones' Let it Bleed (1969), David Bowie's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars (1972), and Lou Reed's Transformer (1972).
On the other side of the world, we have Sunset Sound Recorders, on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, California. It was originally built for recording the music to Walt Disney movies, and you can thank them for Mary Poppins, Bambi, and 101 Dalmatians, but they went on to much greater rock heights.
Probably the most famous album recorded here was the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street (1972, and pictured above), generally believed to be their best ever, but it was also the home of the Beach Boys' best album, Pet Sounds (1966). My personal favorites, however, are Led Zeppelin's albums Led Zeppelin II (1969) and Led Zeppelin IV (1972), both of which were partially recorded and mixed here. Other famous ones include the Doors' The Doors (1967) and Strange Days (1967), Jet's Get Born (2003), the Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, and, of course, Macy Gray's On How Life Is (2000).
Headley Grange
Headley Grange is a former poorhouse in Headley, England, and it gets on this list for a single reason: its stairwell. During a recording session in the room next door, Jimmy Page was trying out the riff to When the Levee Breaks,” when the crew started setting up John Bonham's drum kit in the hall. He went out, start playing, and they recorded it from the stairwell.
The result is one of rock's best ever sounds. Bad Company, Fleetwood Mac, Genesis, and Peter Frampton recorded here as well.
Motown
Of course Motown is on here. Technically, the studio itself is called Hitsville, U.S.A.” (now a museum, pictured at the bottom), but the site was also the home of Motown's headquarters in Detroit, and as such I'm calling it Motown. It was without a doubt one of the most important recording studios of all time, and if you say the name Motown” now, it evokes an entire genre of music put out by Berry Gordy's Motown label.
Among the many great albums recorded at Hitsville are Marvin Gaye's What's Going On (1971) and Let's Get it On (1973), the Jackson 5's debut Diana Ross Presents the Jackson 5 (1969 — Ross and the Supremes are pictured at the top left with Berry Gordy), the Marvelettes' Please Mr. Postman (1961), and Stevie Wonder's debut, The Jazz Soul of Little Stevie (1962).
Electric Lady Studios
Electric Lady Studios (as you've probably guessed) was founded by Jimi Hendrix after how much it cost him to record his epic album Electric Ladyland. Hendrix was only able to use the studio for four weeks before he died, but the studio, in New York's Greenwich Village, is still very much in use.
We can thank Electric Lady Studios for Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy (1973) and Physical Graffiti (1975), Patti Smith's Horses (1975) The Clash's Combat Rock (1982), Billy Idol's Rebel Yell (1983) Weezer's eponymous 1995 album, Santana's Supernatural (1999), the White Stripes' De Stijl (2000), the Roots' Game Theory (2006), as well as a ton of Kiss albums.
Sun Studio
We've been focusing a lot on rock, so let's just get this out of our system: Sun Studio, in Memphis, Tennessee, was originally more of a blues outfit. But blues begat rock, and it begat it right in Sun Studios in the form of Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, and Johnny Cash, all of whom recorded albums here.
Aside from the founders of rock, Sun Studio also recorded albums for blues greats B.B. King, Howlin' Wolf, and Junior Parker. It closed for a while but then reopened in 1987, where, probably most notably, it recorded U2's Rattle and Hum (1988).
Studio One
It's called the Motown of Jamaica,” but really, it should just be called Studio One. Because Studio One is the home of reggae, and it doesn't need the Motown qualifier.
Founded by Clement Coxsone” Dodd (the man with the microphone) back in 1963, Studio One recorded albums for Bob Marley and the Wailers, Lee Scratch Perry, Burning Spear, and Toots and the Maytals. You're welcome, world.
Rolling Stones Mobile Studio
This one could get on here just for the novelty of having what's basically a truck with a recording studio in it, but it's actually been the site of a number of insanely good recordings. It was set up by Mick Jagger when he got sick of all the problems of using regular recording studios. They set up a studio in his home and then, so they could move it around, put a control room into this van.
We can thank the mobile studio for songs like Deep Purple's Smoke on the Water,” and — because it's mobile — for the most famous live recording of Bob Marley's No Woman, No Cry” — the one appearing on the posthumous Legend (1984). It also recorded parts of a number of Stones and Zeppelin albums, as well as Simple Minds' 1979 debut album, Life in a Day, and live performances by Patti Smith and the Ramones.
Capitol Studios
The home of Capitol Records, Capitol Studios gets on this list for the sheer breadth of the artists they've recorded here. All major record labels are going to have crazy amounts of awesome musical artists recording in their studios, but Capitol Records is best known for its echo chambers,” which are part of an underground concrete bunker designed by legendary guitarist and sound engineer Les Paul to get a better reverb sound.
The studios are most famous for being the place where Frank Sinatra did a lot of his recordings — his microphone is still here, and the band Bastille recently recorded on it — as well as being a home to Nat King Cole and the Beach Boys. But it wasn't just older music: Oasis, Daft Punk, Aaliyah, Outkast, and fun. have all recorded here.
Lee Scratch” Perry's Black Ark
Easily the most fascinating studio on this list is Lee Scratch” Perry's Black Ark Studio in Kingston, Jamaica. While not quite as mainstream, and definitely more low-tech than nearby Studio One, the Black Ark was known for Perry's innovative producing techniques, and also for his incredibly strange behavior. He was known for blowing ganja smoke into the tape decks, burying tapes, and spraying the unprotected tapes with blood, urine, and whiskey to bless” them. Eventually, after a few rough years of being extorted by gangsters, Perry covered the entire building in magic-marker drawings and then burned it to the ground to get rid of ‘bad spirits.' Other than producing many of Perry's own records (and basically inventing the ‘dub' genre), Black Ark gave us recordings from Bob Marley, Paul McCartney and Wings, the Clash, and Junior Murvin.
Hans Zimmer's Music Lair
You may not have heard of Hans Zimmer, but you've definitely listened to him. Zimmer is the German composer known for writing the scores to movies like Gladiator, The Dark Knight, Inception, and The Lion King. I've always been a fan of his music — try listening to The Dark Knight when you're trying to get some work done, it's second only to Daft Punk's Alive — but I never knew he had an awesome pad like this. It looks like what I imagined Hogwarts looking like. Yes, those are skull lamps, and those aren't bookshelves in the back — that's a synthesizer.
Chase Park Transduction
Athens, Georgia, has become synonymous with awesome music, and one of its most prolific studios is Chase Park Transduction. It's recorded the granddaddy of Athens rock bands, REM, as well as acts like Bright Eyes, Deerhunter, Animal Collective, and Queens of the Stone Age.
Showing posts with label studios. Show all posts
Showing posts with label studios. Show all posts
Monday, 10 July 2017
Wednesday, 28 June 2017
Chris Michie At AIR Studios The Tape
When Broken Barricades was started in late 1970, AIR Studios consisted of two studios (Studios One and Two), a mixing room with a small vocal booth (Studio Three) plus a film sound mixing room that was actually once used as a studio by the Third Ear Band, who recorded the soundtrack to Polanski's MacBeth in it. Broken Barricades was recorded in Studio One, which was a big room suitable for orchestral recording and film scoring (the film side of AIR's business took years to get going and was a bit of a white elephant). I think Studio One was modeled on Abbey Road's Studio One. Anyway, it was the first studio finished when AIR opened in summer 1970 and is where the first sessions were held.
I had been hired earlier that summer by studio manager Keith Slaughter, probably because I kept showing up during construction looking for a job - a real life example of the squeaky wheel getting the grease. For a few weeks or months I worked for Dave Harries and two other maintenance engineers called Bill (I think) and Danny, wiring up jackfields and pulling cables through the ducts between studio and control room. Already on staff were engineers Bill Price (from Decca) and Jack Clegg (from film scoring studio CTS). Ex-Decca engineer John Punter and tape-ops Alan Harris (ex-Morgan, I think) and Alex somebody joined soon after. Nigel somebody, Steve Nye and Simaen Skolfeld were all later hired as tape-ops, John Middleton was hired as a film sound engineer (though he also recorded half of Roxy Music's For Your Pleasure before the producer was sacked and Chris Thomas and John Punter took over) and the staff also included various receptionists, an ex-Abbey Road tea lady, and two porters, one of whom was a fantastically cheerful Jamaican, who would move the session players' instruments in and out (bands had roadies for that). I was the first of the original crew to leave, I think, though Simaen Skolfeld may have exited under a cloud after failing to turn up for a weekend Pink Floyd session - I found the band waiting outside the studio doors when I turned up for a session of my own, and as I later found out for myself, Pink Floyd did not suffer indignity in silence.
Multitrack recording has changed quite a bit since the '70s, but it probably changed more between Sgt. Pepper's.. and Exotic Birds and Fruit than any time since. Procol went through those changes, from 4-track for their first album through 8-track on Home , 16-track up through Grand Hotel and finally 24-track for Exotic.. (I've always assumed that the reason there was never a stereo mix of the 1st album is because someone had re-used the 1-inch four-track tape after the original mono mix had been finished - that stuff was expensive.
Does anyone know the full story?
There were many technical advances made during the few years between Broken Barricades and Exotic Birds and Fruit, but the general recording principles remained the same; only the tools changed. For example, though the AKG D12 (a dynamic mic) had been the traditional choice for bass (kick) drum in the 1960s and early 70s, it later became common to use an expensive, large diaphragm condenser microphone like the Neumann U87. Though the U87 had both 10dB pad and bass rolloff switches built into it, the accepted wisdom had been that the high transients and sheer SPL put out by a bass drum would likely tear the diaphragm from its surround, or at least produce a distorted signal. There may have been some truth to this theory, but it has to be remembered that until the 70s most studio engineers came up through a fairly rigid training and apprentice program. In the large company studios (Decca's West Hampstead, EMI's Abbey Road, Pye, CBS, etc.) the recording engineers were trained and managed by the maintenance engineers. A young engineer who used the "wrong" mics or abused the equipment in other ways would not do well in a work environment run by men in white coats. I am speculating here, but it seems probable that the habits of economy and "making do" practised in post-war Britain were carried on for some time by an "old guard" of technical engineers long after the fantastic growth of the recording industry had changed the rules. The Beatles had demonstrated that you could spend several months making a record, rather than several hours, and still make a profit, so it became less and less sensible for studio managers to refuse to let visiting engineers and artists do what they wanted - after all, the bills were now going to independent managers and record labels rather than to the studio's corporate parents.
AIR Studios was an independent studio, but it was run by managers and technical staff who had been poached from Abbey Road and Decca, so tended to have a rather stuffier atmosphere than other independents, like Trident, Island, Morgan and Olympic. There were, of course, occasional fire extinguisher fights and other isolated incidents of mayhem, but engineers and clients generally behaved rather well. During the day, of course, there were various technical and administrative people around, but after 6 pm there was usually only a night watchman and whoever was working in the other studios. But I distinctly remember the day that Todd Rundgren turned up with green streaks in his hair - that wasn't the sort of thing you saw in the corridors of AIR very often.
All this is a very long-winded way of explaining that as the years went by engineers developed more radical methods of recording. There were few, if any books on recording technique, so most engineers learned by watching others. On entering another engineer's session one would immediately listen for a moment and then say something like "nice drum sound." If it really was a nice drum sound, then a smart visiting engineer would figure out what the resident engineer was doing, and copy it. I still remember the drum-miking set up that I learned from an engineer who had copied it from Glyn Johns (long associated with Olympic). Since it's the mic setup that was (probably) used on Beggars' Banquet and Led Zeppelin (the first album), I'll describe here what was described to me. Snare and kick mic as usual, and I don't know which mics Johns favored. But instead of individual tom-tom mics, set close and pointing down into the drum shell, plus a stereo overhead pair, Johns set up only two kit mics, both Neumann U87s (or the previous model, the U67). One was positioned above the two rack toms at about the height of the drummer's forehead, the other at the (drummer's) right rear corner of the kit next to the floor tom and facing across it toward the snare.
Between them, these two mics picked up the entire kit and panning the two mics left and right gave a good stereo spread. It's hard to convey this now, but at the time I heard about this technique (and heard it demonstrated) I was very impressed. I had learned to engineer by watching engineers close-mic virtually everything (e.g. to mic a harp, you wrapped the mic in a sock or foam, and inserted it into the instrument from the pedal end), and the idea of an overall drum mix from two mics, supplemented by kick and snare "spot" mics struck me as radical. Of course, in the 40s and 50s engineers were careful not to put mics too near to percussion instruments, for fear that the transients would distort or blow out the diaphragms, so I was really only rediscovering an old technique. As the 70s progressed, drum sounds moved away from Ringo's muffled toms and the techniques of super separation (listen to Ken Scott 's early recordings of Billy Cobham). Partly because of Led Zeppelin's success, but also because their records were superbly produced, the open, crashing sound of John Bonham soon became more fashionable than the dry, padded drum sound typical of early 70s rock albums. Led Zeppelin's When the Levee Breaks has, I think, the most extraordinarily enormous yet somehow realistic drum sound ever recorded, and it launched a complete re-evaluation of the way that drums should sound on record, leading to a decade of ambience mics and PAs in the studio.
So, as I was saying, fashions in mics came and went. Bill Price and John Punter had trained at Decca Records' West Hampstead studios, so tended to follow the techniques they'd developed there. AIR was well-equipped with Neumann and AKG condenser mics and when Geoff Emerick came over from Apple he used the Coles 4038 ribbon mics he'd been using on Beatles records. (They were actually called something else then, I can't remember what, but Coles makes them now.) American producers would show up and be stunned at the number of Neumann U87s we had in stock, but they'd also ask for things we didn't have and be surprised we didn't all use Shure SM57s on snare. There was an AKG dynamic mic called (I think) the D212 that some people used on toms and bass and brass instruments, and an AKG 224 dynamic pencil mic that Tony Ashton insisted on as a vocal mic for a particularly disastrous (for me) Ashton, Gardner & Dyke session that I engineered for Gus Dudgeon.
DOLBY SIGNAL STRETCHERS
My guess is that Broken Barricades was recorded with the then-fairly-new Dolby A "signal stretcher" devices. These were big suckers, and 16 channels took up two full racks, each about four feet high. Eventually, the switching was automated, but for a significant period you had to manually switch each channel back and forth between record and play modes.
This was, of course, a job for the tape op, and a damn tedious one it was. I distinctly remember that the remix session for The Paul Winter Consort's Icarus album was a nightmare.
George Martin had produced this in America around the same time as the second Capitol Seatrain album, but Paul Winter had done a bunch of recording himself and wanted various tracks to be compiled from different performances - recorded at different studios with different musicians and different track layouts. Once the multi-track tapes were assembled, as each edit passed the playback head the bass would suddenly switch from track 1 to track 11 and the whole tape would go from Dolby to non-Dolby. Bill Price did the mix, sometimes a few bars at a time, exactly the kind of mind-boggling technical problem-solving that he could do in his sleep, while I tried manfully to keep up with the Dolby switching. I wasn't very good at it, but Bill seemed to think I showed promise and the other available tape ops weren't much better, so I stayed with the project.
If you want to hear how a Dolby encoded track sounds like when it hasn't been decoded, listen to Eno's first album. It was mixed by Chris Thomas and there's a track where they just left the Dolbys off when making the production master - it sounds all grainy and trashy and squished, which is presumably exactly what they were after.
24-TRACK
Though AIR was at the technical forefront in 1972 with 16-track recording (Pink Floyd came to AIR to finish the Meddle album on 16-track because Abbey Road was still only 8-track), 24-track soon became the next big thing. Studer had by this time figured out how to make a 2-inch machine (the A80?) and during the time I was away from AIR (February 1972 to September 1973) they must have switched the whole studio to that format. So Exotic Birds and Fruit was recorded 24-track.
Dolby's original eight- or ten-rackspace Signal Stretchers had shrunk down to a single rack space per channel and eventually wound up as cards, so 24 channels of Dolby A plus various channels for stereo and mixdown could easily be accommodated in a couple of equipment racks. Wherever a signal was going to tape, you patched it through Dolbys, and I remember John Punter using Dolby on the send and return signals to tape delay - before sending a signal to an echo chamber or EMT reverberation plate, it was common to delay the signal a few milliseconds by passing it through a tape delay machine. In true Abbey Road style, this setup had the acronym STEED for stereo echo, echo delay (or something similar). Similarly, ADT was for years the accepted shorthand for artificial (or automatic) double tracking.
I had been hired earlier that summer by studio manager Keith Slaughter, probably because I kept showing up during construction looking for a job - a real life example of the squeaky wheel getting the grease. For a few weeks or months I worked for Dave Harries and two other maintenance engineers called Bill (I think) and Danny, wiring up jackfields and pulling cables through the ducts between studio and control room. Already on staff were engineers Bill Price (from Decca) and Jack Clegg (from film scoring studio CTS). Ex-Decca engineer John Punter and tape-ops Alan Harris (ex-Morgan, I think) and Alex somebody joined soon after. Nigel somebody, Steve Nye and Simaen Skolfeld were all later hired as tape-ops, John Middleton was hired as a film sound engineer (though he also recorded half of Roxy Music's For Your Pleasure before the producer was sacked and Chris Thomas and John Punter took over) and the staff also included various receptionists, an ex-Abbey Road tea lady, and two porters, one of whom was a fantastically cheerful Jamaican, who would move the session players' instruments in and out (bands had roadies for that). I was the first of the original crew to leave, I think, though Simaen Skolfeld may have exited under a cloud after failing to turn up for a weekend Pink Floyd session - I found the band waiting outside the studio doors when I turned up for a session of my own, and as I later found out for myself, Pink Floyd did not suffer indignity in silence.
Multitrack recording has changed quite a bit since the '70s, but it probably changed more between Sgt. Pepper's.. and Exotic Birds and Fruit than any time since. Procol went through those changes, from 4-track for their first album through 8-track on Home , 16-track up through Grand Hotel and finally 24-track for Exotic.. (I've always assumed that the reason there was never a stereo mix of the 1st album is because someone had re-used the 1-inch four-track tape after the original mono mix had been finished - that stuff was expensive.
Does anyone know the full story?
There were many technical advances made during the few years between Broken Barricades and Exotic Birds and Fruit, but the general recording principles remained the same; only the tools changed. For example, though the AKG D12 (a dynamic mic) had been the traditional choice for bass (kick) drum in the 1960s and early 70s, it later became common to use an expensive, large diaphragm condenser microphone like the Neumann U87. Though the U87 had both 10dB pad and bass rolloff switches built into it, the accepted wisdom had been that the high transients and sheer SPL put out by a bass drum would likely tear the diaphragm from its surround, or at least produce a distorted signal. There may have been some truth to this theory, but it has to be remembered that until the 70s most studio engineers came up through a fairly rigid training and apprentice program. In the large company studios (Decca's West Hampstead, EMI's Abbey Road, Pye, CBS, etc.) the recording engineers were trained and managed by the maintenance engineers. A young engineer who used the "wrong" mics or abused the equipment in other ways would not do well in a work environment run by men in white coats. I am speculating here, but it seems probable that the habits of economy and "making do" practised in post-war Britain were carried on for some time by an "old guard" of technical engineers long after the fantastic growth of the recording industry had changed the rules. The Beatles had demonstrated that you could spend several months making a record, rather than several hours, and still make a profit, so it became less and less sensible for studio managers to refuse to let visiting engineers and artists do what they wanted - after all, the bills were now going to independent managers and record labels rather than to the studio's corporate parents.
AIR Studios was an independent studio, but it was run by managers and technical staff who had been poached from Abbey Road and Decca, so tended to have a rather stuffier atmosphere than other independents, like Trident, Island, Morgan and Olympic. There were, of course, occasional fire extinguisher fights and other isolated incidents of mayhem, but engineers and clients generally behaved rather well. During the day, of course, there were various technical and administrative people around, but after 6 pm there was usually only a night watchman and whoever was working in the other studios. But I distinctly remember the day that Todd Rundgren turned up with green streaks in his hair - that wasn't the sort of thing you saw in the corridors of AIR very often.
All this is a very long-winded way of explaining that as the years went by engineers developed more radical methods of recording. There were few, if any books on recording technique, so most engineers learned by watching others. On entering another engineer's session one would immediately listen for a moment and then say something like "nice drum sound." If it really was a nice drum sound, then a smart visiting engineer would figure out what the resident engineer was doing, and copy it. I still remember the drum-miking set up that I learned from an engineer who had copied it from Glyn Johns (long associated with Olympic). Since it's the mic setup that was (probably) used on Beggars' Banquet and Led Zeppelin (the first album), I'll describe here what was described to me. Snare and kick mic as usual, and I don't know which mics Johns favored. But instead of individual tom-tom mics, set close and pointing down into the drum shell, plus a stereo overhead pair, Johns set up only two kit mics, both Neumann U87s (or the previous model, the U67). One was positioned above the two rack toms at about the height of the drummer's forehead, the other at the (drummer's) right rear corner of the kit next to the floor tom and facing across it toward the snare.
Between them, these two mics picked up the entire kit and panning the two mics left and right gave a good stereo spread. It's hard to convey this now, but at the time I heard about this technique (and heard it demonstrated) I was very impressed. I had learned to engineer by watching engineers close-mic virtually everything (e.g. to mic a harp, you wrapped the mic in a sock or foam, and inserted it into the instrument from the pedal end), and the idea of an overall drum mix from two mics, supplemented by kick and snare "spot" mics struck me as radical. Of course, in the 40s and 50s engineers were careful not to put mics too near to percussion instruments, for fear that the transients would distort or blow out the diaphragms, so I was really only rediscovering an old technique. As the 70s progressed, drum sounds moved away from Ringo's muffled toms and the techniques of super separation (listen to Ken Scott 's early recordings of Billy Cobham). Partly because of Led Zeppelin's success, but also because their records were superbly produced, the open, crashing sound of John Bonham soon became more fashionable than the dry, padded drum sound typical of early 70s rock albums. Led Zeppelin's When the Levee Breaks has, I think, the most extraordinarily enormous yet somehow realistic drum sound ever recorded, and it launched a complete re-evaluation of the way that drums should sound on record, leading to a decade of ambience mics and PAs in the studio.
So, as I was saying, fashions in mics came and went. Bill Price and John Punter had trained at Decca Records' West Hampstead studios, so tended to follow the techniques they'd developed there. AIR was well-equipped with Neumann and AKG condenser mics and when Geoff Emerick came over from Apple he used the Coles 4038 ribbon mics he'd been using on Beatles records. (They were actually called something else then, I can't remember what, but Coles makes them now.) American producers would show up and be stunned at the number of Neumann U87s we had in stock, but they'd also ask for things we didn't have and be surprised we didn't all use Shure SM57s on snare. There was an AKG dynamic mic called (I think) the D212 that some people used on toms and bass and brass instruments, and an AKG 224 dynamic pencil mic that Tony Ashton insisted on as a vocal mic for a particularly disastrous (for me) Ashton, Gardner & Dyke session that I engineered for Gus Dudgeon.
DOLBY SIGNAL STRETCHERS
My guess is that Broken Barricades was recorded with the then-fairly-new Dolby A "signal stretcher" devices. These were big suckers, and 16 channels took up two full racks, each about four feet high. Eventually, the switching was automated, but for a significant period you had to manually switch each channel back and forth between record and play modes.
This was, of course, a job for the tape op, and a damn tedious one it was. I distinctly remember that the remix session for The Paul Winter Consort's Icarus album was a nightmare.
George Martin had produced this in America around the same time as the second Capitol Seatrain album, but Paul Winter had done a bunch of recording himself and wanted various tracks to be compiled from different performances - recorded at different studios with different musicians and different track layouts. Once the multi-track tapes were assembled, as each edit passed the playback head the bass would suddenly switch from track 1 to track 11 and the whole tape would go from Dolby to non-Dolby. Bill Price did the mix, sometimes a few bars at a time, exactly the kind of mind-boggling technical problem-solving that he could do in his sleep, while I tried manfully to keep up with the Dolby switching. I wasn't very good at it, but Bill seemed to think I showed promise and the other available tape ops weren't much better, so I stayed with the project.
If you want to hear how a Dolby encoded track sounds like when it hasn't been decoded, listen to Eno's first album. It was mixed by Chris Thomas and there's a track where they just left the Dolbys off when making the production master - it sounds all grainy and trashy and squished, which is presumably exactly what they were after.
24-TRACK
Though AIR was at the technical forefront in 1972 with 16-track recording (Pink Floyd came to AIR to finish the Meddle album on 16-track because Abbey Road was still only 8-track), 24-track soon became the next big thing. Studer had by this time figured out how to make a 2-inch machine (the A80?) and during the time I was away from AIR (February 1972 to September 1973) they must have switched the whole studio to that format. So Exotic Birds and Fruit was recorded 24-track.
Dolby's original eight- or ten-rackspace Signal Stretchers had shrunk down to a single rack space per channel and eventually wound up as cards, so 24 channels of Dolby A plus various channels for stereo and mixdown could easily be accommodated in a couple of equipment racks. Wherever a signal was going to tape, you patched it through Dolbys, and I remember John Punter using Dolby on the send and return signals to tape delay - before sending a signal to an echo chamber or EMT reverberation plate, it was common to delay the signal a few milliseconds by passing it through a tape delay machine. In true Abbey Road style, this setup had the acronym STEED for stereo echo, echo delay (or something similar). Similarly, ADT was for years the accepted shorthand for artificial (or automatic) double tracking.
Friday, 5 August 2016
Uk Recording Studios In The 50s And 60s
Let's start at the end of the 1950s. Most of the first generation of recording studios built their own sound consoles. It has been suggestedthat they had to do this because professional commercial desks were unavailable at that is probably the other way round. There were few desk manufactures because the small amount of studios around didn't need them. It made sense and was the norm to build custom consoles to suit.
The first generation of mixing desks were simple affairs consisting of a small quantity of mic pre-amps, some limited eq if you were lucky and a set of output amps The big studios like Abbey Road and Decca had R&D departments and maintenance staff, for who,building some valve mic pre-amps would be done before the morning tea break. If desired, modular pres could be bought like the Telefunken V72s that EMI used to build the sixties consoles around.
As more tracks became available on tape machines the desks needed more channels to accommodate so designerslooked towards the emerging introduction of the transistor in the late fifties opened up many more avenues of design, with their small size, low voltage use and eventually, low cost. Dick Sweetenham over at Olympic and Rupert Neve led the way in the recording field being two of the first in the commercial sector to experiment with this technology and build transistor consoles in the early sixties.
The majority of the professional studios where based in London. The engineers and maintenance staff of studios often moved around so one studios 'secrets' could be passed onto the next place of work. And many of these engineers worked at one time or another for Abbey Road, the university of sound, which not only designed its own equipment but would study and modify the best from America and Germany.
The vast majority of recordings in the UK where being produced on British desk and most designs were linked directly to studios. The in house designs of EMI, Trident, and Sound Techniques would become commercially available. Dick Sweetenham's desk at Olympic was a blueprint for the formation of Helios. Decca only built for themselves and then you had the independent companies, the main two being Neve and Cadac. These are the names that have achieved almost legendary status.There was also the Soundcraft with the series1/2 , Rosser from Wales built one of the Mayfair desk and became a big part of the Rockfield set up but were more of a communications company. We shouldn't forget Vic Keary over at Maximum Sound and Chalk Farm. Vic built his valve desks, told everybody for the next 40 years that valves were best and eventually most people agreed with him. Hats off to you Vic.
Vic now designs the superb Thermionic Culture range of equipment ( no I'm not being paid to advertise, just credit where credits due) There were few foreign desks in the UK, these being from the German manufactures Neumann and Telefunken.
Advances in electronics and technology would suggest that these desks would now be museum pieces, valued for their historic and nostalgic value, leaving us wondering how the makers of the recorded music coped with such primitive offerings. We've now come to the realization that the technology used within these desks may have just been spot on for the recording of pop and rock music. In fact it could also be suggested that these consoles were an integral part of that sound.Maybe the public always knew that those records sounded wonderful and that we never really needed all these so called now refer to much of this gear as 'classic'.
In terms of features and control, the designs of today are light years away from what was once used. But what about the sound?
If we compare old to new with our electronic test instruments we could happily come to the conclusion that new is best. But what are we testing for here? Is one system better quality, more accurate, more transparent, less distortion. Technically distortion should be as low as possible. But do listening tests back this important is phase integrity? Can we really list in order what are the most important elements for the design of recording equipment. Is not the bottom line producing a sound that the engineer, producer and musician likes, that can be put onto record for the public to like? The guitars and amps of the late fifties and early sixties are still seen as possibly the best designs, the sound of rock and roll in its broadest sense. So why is it so hard sometimes to accept that much of the studio gear of that era sounded right for that style of music.
Many of the designers of that era have become historical figures within the recording industry and their designs are seen aslegendary to be borrowed and reworked. But is it possible that we suddenly had a burst of great designers in the sixties and seventies and now the secret information and judgment that these people had has been lost ? Is there common ground in these designs? Yes.
Discrete circuitry, first valve then transistor, inductive eq and transformer coupled.
They were designing and building with the information and components that were normal for that era.
'There are some desk where, by pure fluke, it actually enhances the sound -Dick Sweetham's first desk at Olympic for example.' Glyn Johns - June 81.
Sunday, 17 July 2016
Drum Techniques
For those who have ever recorded multitrack drums you know it can be a challenge to get everything right. There are a lot of excellent articles on the subject (Bruce Miller's website is a great resource for this and so many other details about recording and music production: Bruce Miller's free audio course
For myself, I have a pretty simple checklist that has served me well.
1. Make sure the drummer tunes his drums
2. Work with the drummer to find the right amount of resonance for snare, toms, etc. Too much ringing can be distracting- too little can kill the tone of the drums, making them sound paper-like. Moon gels work great for this: RTOM Corp website
3. Never mount SM57 mics on the drums. The baffle of the 57 rattles slightly when the mic is shaken and can ruin otherwise great drum sounds.
4. Always check what the drums sound like in the room. If the room is supposed to be live” listen to the way it sounds. If it is supposed to be dead”, walk around and clap and listen for flutter echo”- the sound of really quickly repeated echos that happens when sound bounces off of two parallel hard surfaces (like most walls.) If you hear some try hanging blankets, comforters, acoustic panels, pillows, whatever you can to get rid of the flutter echo.
5. When micing cymbals, ride, or high hat, don't point the mic flatly at the cymbal. Angle it slightly so the front of the mic is not perpendicular to the cymbal. If close micing cymbals with the mic perpendicular you can get some weird swimming” sounds from the cymbals, especially the ride. As the ride moves significantly closer and further from the mic it will get louder and quieter. I tend to aim at where the drummer will hit the cymbal to get the most attack.
6. Be sure to flip polarity on your preamp or in your recording software when needed. This is sometimes called flipping phase.” Basically you just push the polarity flip button back and forth and listen. The setting that has the most low end is the correct one, as phase cancelling is most obvious at low frequencies. Situations where this might be necessary are numerous- room mics, overhead mics, kick mics, bottom snare mics all may need to have the polarity flip applied. There are really two reasons for doing this:
a. When multi-micing a drum like a snare it can sound weird to have one mic pointed at the top and capturing the first strike of the stick as a sucking” away from the mic and having a mic on the bottom that sees” this first strike of the stick as a pushing” towards it. For this reason I always check polarity on bottom snare or bottom tom mics and 99% of the time I flip the bottom mic. This essentially makes both microphones see the stick striking the drum head as moving in the same direction.
b. Different mics will capture the same sound at slightly different times simply because of the distance between each mic and the source of the sound. The overheads are a great example. The sound they capture will always be a bit behind the sound of a close mic in capturing any drum. Anytime there is a significant distance between microphones it is good to check the polarity. Similar to over/under micing you want all microphones that capture a sound to capture it as close to pushing and sucking together as possible. Obviously with a drumset this isn't fully possible, but flipping polarity can help in most situations.
7. Tube guitar amps tend to sound best when played very loud. There are some cool gadgets for enabling a guitarist to saturate their amp and have their cabinet put out less sound, enabling them to play more quietly and still have killer tone. There are no such tools for drums. The tone of the drums will vary largely depending on where and how hard they are hit.
Snare and toms especially will tend to have the best tone when played VERY loud. Of course, volume may have to take a back seat to practical considerations (neighbors, hearing your headphones, etc.) and to musical style, but in general the louder the better.
8. Always listen to each drum hit individually. Sometimes little rattles can hide in the wall of sound when the whole kit is played, but they will become audible during quieter sections.
9. Always record at 24-bit. Some programs default to 16-bit. This greatly reduces dynamic range and makes recording drums well extremely difficult. Set the record volumes so that peaks hit -12 dB when rehearsing. The drummer will likely play louder when performing. This setting enables you to capture the most dynamic range with little fear of overing.
10. Choosing overhead placement is critical. I tend to like having my kick, snare, and mid tom sound dead center in my mixes, so that is where I want them in my overheads. I do this by drawing an imaginary line from the center of the snare through the center of the kick. This is where I want the center of my mix, so the overheads should capture sound from either side of this line. I then place my overheads so that they are the same distance from the center of the snare and the kick, and point them at the snare. (I use a belt, mic cable, whatever's free to measure and adjust until the distances are correct.) In the diagram below the kick, snare and center tom are in Orange. The microphones are red dots, with the imaginary centerline in bold and the distance measurements in dotted line. These should all be equal.
For myself, I have a pretty simple checklist that has served me well.
1. Make sure the drummer tunes his drums
2. Work with the drummer to find the right amount of resonance for snare, toms, etc. Too much ringing can be distracting- too little can kill the tone of the drums, making them sound paper-like. Moon gels work great for this: RTOM Corp website
3. Never mount SM57 mics on the drums. The baffle of the 57 rattles slightly when the mic is shaken and can ruin otherwise great drum sounds.
4. Always check what the drums sound like in the room. If the room is supposed to be live” listen to the way it sounds. If it is supposed to be dead”, walk around and clap and listen for flutter echo”- the sound of really quickly repeated echos that happens when sound bounces off of two parallel hard surfaces (like most walls.) If you hear some try hanging blankets, comforters, acoustic panels, pillows, whatever you can to get rid of the flutter echo.
5. When micing cymbals, ride, or high hat, don't point the mic flatly at the cymbal. Angle it slightly so the front of the mic is not perpendicular to the cymbal. If close micing cymbals with the mic perpendicular you can get some weird swimming” sounds from the cymbals, especially the ride. As the ride moves significantly closer and further from the mic it will get louder and quieter. I tend to aim at where the drummer will hit the cymbal to get the most attack.
6. Be sure to flip polarity on your preamp or in your recording software when needed. This is sometimes called flipping phase.” Basically you just push the polarity flip button back and forth and listen. The setting that has the most low end is the correct one, as phase cancelling is most obvious at low frequencies. Situations where this might be necessary are numerous- room mics, overhead mics, kick mics, bottom snare mics all may need to have the polarity flip applied. There are really two reasons for doing this:
a. When multi-micing a drum like a snare it can sound weird to have one mic pointed at the top and capturing the first strike of the stick as a sucking” away from the mic and having a mic on the bottom that sees” this first strike of the stick as a pushing” towards it. For this reason I always check polarity on bottom snare or bottom tom mics and 99% of the time I flip the bottom mic. This essentially makes both microphones see the stick striking the drum head as moving in the same direction.
b. Different mics will capture the same sound at slightly different times simply because of the distance between each mic and the source of the sound. The overheads are a great example. The sound they capture will always be a bit behind the sound of a close mic in capturing any drum. Anytime there is a significant distance between microphones it is good to check the polarity. Similar to over/under micing you want all microphones that capture a sound to capture it as close to pushing and sucking together as possible. Obviously with a drumset this isn't fully possible, but flipping polarity can help in most situations.
7. Tube guitar amps tend to sound best when played very loud. There are some cool gadgets for enabling a guitarist to saturate their amp and have their cabinet put out less sound, enabling them to play more quietly and still have killer tone. There are no such tools for drums. The tone of the drums will vary largely depending on where and how hard they are hit.
Snare and toms especially will tend to have the best tone when played VERY loud. Of course, volume may have to take a back seat to practical considerations (neighbors, hearing your headphones, etc.) and to musical style, but in general the louder the better.
8. Always listen to each drum hit individually. Sometimes little rattles can hide in the wall of sound when the whole kit is played, but they will become audible during quieter sections.
9. Always record at 24-bit. Some programs default to 16-bit. This greatly reduces dynamic range and makes recording drums well extremely difficult. Set the record volumes so that peaks hit -12 dB when rehearsing. The drummer will likely play louder when performing. This setting enables you to capture the most dynamic range with little fear of overing.
10. Choosing overhead placement is critical. I tend to like having my kick, snare, and mid tom sound dead center in my mixes, so that is where I want them in my overheads. I do this by drawing an imaginary line from the center of the snare through the center of the kick. This is where I want the center of my mix, so the overheads should capture sound from either side of this line. I then place my overheads so that they are the same distance from the center of the snare and the kick, and point them at the snare. (I use a belt, mic cable, whatever's free to measure and adjust until the distances are correct.) In the diagram below the kick, snare and center tom are in Orange. The microphones are red dots, with the imaginary centerline in bold and the distance measurements in dotted line. These should all be equal.
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