On the way it was done
I think the biggest change was a reduction in the size of the band required and that was mostly an economic consideration.
I never met anybody in rock and roll who wouldn’t have wanted the James Brown band backing them up if they could have afforded it.
They made the best of what they could afford and that limitation often resulted in tremendous creativity.
–
When I visited the EMI London Studio in 1968, there were a LOT of different compressors floating around in addition to the one built into in every channel strip.
Suggesting “the Beatles used compressor x” is just about as big a crock as I can think of because they actually used just about every kind available. The irony is that everybody I talked to HATED the sound of the compression but they put up with it because they hated the sound of tape hiss even more when they were doing multi-generation 4 track production.
The BIG difference WAS the sweat.
When they were doing a live bounce on a Beatles 4 track song, the engineer and the performers HAD to BOTH get it right at the same time unless they wanted to be very embarrassed.
Technology has taken that kind of pressure to perform off. This in turn changed both the amount and the type of performance ability required.
–
The folks who designed the vintage hardware STRICTLY designed for money!
It’s just that the market has become less demanding. In the old days you had to beat the guys in the studio shop on BOTH price and quality or you could forget about selling anything at all. It wasn’t romance, it was competition for highly knowledgeable customers.
–
There isn’t very much about audio production that’s really new.
Polishing turds is worlds cheaper today but it’s really hard to call that progress.
–
The cheapest way to make a great record is hiring great players.
The cheapest way to record great players is all at once in a real studio with a real console and a real engineer and producer.
That’s exactly why it was done that way in the 1920s-’60s.
The way the Beatles ended up making records is very expensive.
The only thing that’s gotten lots cheaper is making records the way the Beatles did.
Hello?
–
My bottom-up view comes from my reverence for America’s popular music and how it grew.
Descendent’s of slave musicians created a school of music in the southeastern United States that became arguably the most important music of the twentieth century.
The development of radio exposed every kind of music far beyond its local point of origin.
The public response to the music of the American south led to performers being booked internationally and recorded.
No mogul just picked out the music they thought was good and “sold” it. The public voted for what they liked by purchasing tickets and recordings. What we now call the music industry grew up by creating the means for artists to reach and get paid by larger audiences.
The problem is that Wall Street hates meritocracies because there is no top-down control.
–
People could still earn a living from gigging and almost nobody looked down their noses at playing “covers.”
The overall full time professional talent pool was a lot larger and the best of those were who got record deals.
It was not very common at all to use compression on anything but vocals.
The biggest studios might have five compressers in the control room and most had two or three.
This forces musicians to control their dynamics just to hear themslves.
There was prosumer equipment in the form of the Tascam half inch 8-track.
–
When I visited EMI I was told that they hated the sound of compression but hated the sound of tape hiss even more. They had just put in the desks with a compressor on every channel. In 1972 I saw an English (Sound Techniques?) console at Sunset Sound that also had a compressor on every input. This was pretty much unheard of in U.S. studios at the time
–
RCA had learned the lesson of not using dead rooms the hard way during the early ’30s. They made it work by carefully shaping the character of the bleed.
Unfortunately their designs were only for their own label or broadcast studios.
The only reason we got one at Motown was because in 1964 RCA was pressing more of our records than they were of their own! -
–
WAY IT WAS DONE
I’m saying most of the music that has been worth hearing has been the product of full time practitioners.
There aren’t a lot of exceptions that I’m aware of.
In fact many were working full time and had their first recording contract before they were 20 years old.
–
Below added 17.5.2010
–
It was originally about money.
In the late ’60s the RIAA cut a deal with the American Federation of Musicians that allowed them to pay any musician who was also the recording artist one session fee per song as full payment rather than hourly pay with a limit on how many minutes of music could be recorded. Labels also sought out artists who did their own songwriting because the top songwriters had been auctioning first recording rights off to the bidder offering the highest advance. The old formula of putting the best songs together with the best singers backed by the very best musicians was more expensive than finding some attractive kids who had some pretty good songs and sticking them in the studio until they could come up with something.
Meanwhile the new technology allowed the best musicians to go back and fix their flubs instead of taking the song again and again until everybody got it right which was a very stressful process.
We loved it because it was less stressful and the labels loved it because it seemed cheaper at the time. Cheap is still ruling which I honestly believe is why sales are so much worse than they were at one time.
Twenty-twenty hindsight tells me that the stress we all detested was actually a major component of what made the old records great. When a singer has the best songs and the greatest musicians behind them, they have no excuse for not delivering a great performance. In fact they are going to look like a fool if they don’t. Great performances is what it’s really all about.
There’s a box set of live Duke Ellington radio “pickups” from the 1940s.
the duke box at Storyville Records
Check it out, these were gigs recorded with just two or three mikes.
Progress? You tell me!
–
