For clarity I will define some terms as I am using them here:
• Mastering is the final stage of optimization of the recorded material while transferring it to the format(s) that will be used in the manufacturing process.
FIGURE 5.4 Jack Mullin in the NBC control room, 1949, with two Ampex 200 “portables,” serial numbers 13 and 14. They are loaded with 3M quarter inch-tape.
Credit: Pavek Museum of Broadcasting.
This step is still necessary in the digital domain. Even though there will be no physical manufacturing taking place, the original recording usually requires optimization before transferring to consumer formats.
• Editing, in the context of this chapter, is the copying, cutting and replacement, removal, or insertion of sections (large and small) into the master recording.
• Sound on sound preceded what we now call overdubbing but was, similarly, a process of adding sounds to those previously recorded. The difference between sound on sound and overdubbing as now performed is that the sound on sound technique (using a single machine) was destructive. Once any part of the new sound was recorded on top of the previous material, the com-ponent elements could not be separated. Previous material could be preserved by bouncing from one machine to another while performing the next overdub.
• Overdubbing is the nondestructive addition of sounds to those previously recorded. Multitrack machines allow overdubs to be undone and redone in part and in their entirety as often as needed.
Mastering
During the electric recording era prior to the introduction of magnetic tape, many of the producers’ tasks were similar to those of today. They might include budget-ing and administration, selectbudget-ing artists, musicians, background sbudget-ingers, repertoire, arrangements, engineers, and recording studios. Additionally, producers were, typi-cally, the guiding force at the session. However, the creativity in the production pro-cess all took place in the preparatory period leading up to the session, in-between takes, and during the few minutes of the performance. Critically, the final master disc was cut live with no opportunity for later changes to it without a generational transfer that would increase noise and decrease fidelity. Magnetic tape separated the mastering of the disc from the process of recording, allowing for a later, final stage of refinement. Mastering from tape to disc also incurs generational loss. However, tape’s significantly greater headroom allows for that loss and what is gained by opti-mizing a recording away from the intensity of the recording session often exceeds any loss. Separating mastering from the recording session, for the first time, permit-ted some post-production control by the producer.
Editing
Tape further extended the creative timeframe, beyond that of a straight-through performance of the piece, by allowing mistakes and otherwise inferior sections of the master to be corrected through editing. Furthermore, it empowered some pro-ducers through its potential as a compositional device. Editing had been possible on
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disc and cylinder formats but was difficult and added generational noise. It neces-sitated transferring audio from one or more machines to another. Timing could be critical and it was a trial and error process. Wire recordings could be edited by cutting the wire and tying a small knot, but was very fiddly and could only be used where the timing of the recorded material was not a critical factor. Easy editing, as with mastering, was an immediate benefit of tape, enabling much greater control of the internal details of a production by the producer.
Sound on Sound
The fragmentation of the production process that allowed an incremental approach to production came with Les Paul’s sound on sound innovation. Sound on sound dramatically increased the producer’s potential for control. In musical terms, pro-duction ceased being a crescendo ending in a sforzando. Before sound on sound, that preproduction crescendo could have lasted minutes or months—finding and filtering material, commissioning and approving arrangements and orchestra-tions, selecting musicians, engineers, studios, and so forth. It could also comprise a meeting or phone call with the artist or just a short conversation before hitting the record button. Especially with jazz musicians, quick head arrangements were common: “You play an eight-bar intro, and we’ll all come in for the head,” and suchlike. Nonetheless, from the instant the cutting head was lowered onto the disc or cylinder, no musical corrections or changes could be made to that take. Sound on sound permitted the stretching out of the creative process. The explosive sfor-zando (typically three to five minutes for a single performance recorded direct to disc) could now become a slow motion process that sustained from the first note recorded to the final layer. The producer could now examine parts of the produc-tion in isolaproduc-tion, repeating and correcting for technical, musical, or creative reasons until he or she was satisfied. The length of the piece no longer defined the duration of the recording process.
Whilst it was a cumbersome and destructive method of overdubbing, the devel-opment of sound on sound was a critical step in the history of music production.
Like editing, sound on sound recording was possible but not easy in the era when performances were mechanically cut into grooves on discs or cylinders. Overdubs for both disc and wire recorders involved playing back the original recording while performing the overdub and recording the mix of the two to a second machine.
Each bounce raised the noise floor and degraded the quality of the successive dub.
And so it was for tape until Les Paul.
Les Paul is probably most famous for the Gibson signature Les Paul electric guitar that became an iconic item of rock paraphernalia, but he was also a versatile studio guitarist, hit songwriter, television star, recording engineer, producer, and inventor. His contribution to the art of music production is immeasurable. Paul was
one of the pioneers of sound on sound recording and overdubbing, which he began experimenting with using disc technology. He described his disc-to-disc technique in an interview with the appropriately named Sound On Sound magazine:
I built two disc machines, and I’d bop between them while I played the first part and then added the second, third, fourth, fifth parts and so on. However, that was a rather difficult way of doing things, and the sound on sound also became a little tricky because of the degeneration that took place. After you’d go 25, 30 dubs down that first part got to sound pretty bad. So, what we did was layer the parts down in the order that would best cope with the sound deterioration.
Instead of putting the first part on first, we might put it on last—it was all about the importance of the part we were dealing with. If I was beating out a drum part, a rhythm, with my hands on the guitar, that could deteriorate all it wanted and it didn’t matter, and the same applied if I was just laying down some organ chords with tremolo on them.11
Capitol Records’ 1948 release “Lover” was the first recording by Paul with him playing eight different electric guitar parts. He recorded the parts as described: one at a time onto an acetate disc, then bouncing to another disc while playing a new part along with the first. Paul was not overdubbing to replace or emulate a band; he was using the technology creatively, playing with recording speeds to create effects that a live performance could not achieve. He used some five hundred recording discs to perfect the result.12
Paul also played guitar for Bing Crosby who, in 1949, gave him one of the earli-est Ampex tape recorders. Some sources say it was the second machine made in the 200 series but in his Sound On Sound interview Paul identified it as an Ampex 300.
In any event, he said he looked at it and, “all of a sudden the light went on—what if I put a fourth head on this machine?”13 While he was on tour, Ampex mailed him another head that he installed before the erase, record, and playback heads. He used this modified machine to record all of his and Mary Ford’s biggest hits, some of them while touring and incorporating as many as thirty-seven dubs.14 The process could be and was also performed using two machines by bouncing from one to the other. This preserved the previously completed tracks (in the event of a mistake on the latest overdub) but generational degradation was still a problem.
Irrespective of the details, Les Paul—through his numerous innovations—fur-ther integrated the recording studio as a creative instrument into the production pro-cess. He disengaged production from real time, teased apart its component strands, and approached it as an incremental composition in sound, conflating it with the songwriting, arranging, orchestration, performance, and technical elements.
His many guitar parts were DI’d (direct injected or plugged directly into the tape machine) and he pioneered and applied a palette of techniques that would become standard tools for producers. These included double tracking, varispeed, delay and repeat echo. Some of these techniques he conceived and used even before magnetic tape, as he demonstrated on his disc recording of “Lover.” He expanded
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on them employing tape-based sound on sound on classic tracks such as “How High the Moon,” and his and Mary Ford’s many other hits. Paul pushed equipment beyond the manufacturers’ envisioned uses by discovering creative applications, and by modifying the machines. His creative and technological innovations exemplify the synergistic and bilateral relationship between technological advancement and the creative needs of producers.
Mixing a recording session live to disc was challenging and a mistake could usually only be fixed with a retake. Sound on sound, as a destructive overdubbing technique, meant that if Paul made a mistake on the most recent layer he lost all the layers he had done before. Balancing each layer was based on experience and trial and error. He had to play the dub back to be certain if the levels were cor-rect or if the degradation was acceptable. He said he began to think that, “Using sound on sound was crazy. There’s a better way: Stack the heads one on top of the other, 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8, and align them so we could do self-sync, with all the heads in line.”15 He explained the idea to his manager, who could not fully grasp the concept or the implications but, “Wondered if it was a good idea.” Paul told him, “I think it will change the world.” With that, his manager told him he “should do something about it.”
Overdubbing
Paul took his manager’s advice and visited Westrex in California: “But they didn’t think it was a good idea and said it wasn’t feasible. So I went up to Ampex.
They leapt at the idea. And that’s how the 8 track was born.”16 There are credible conflicting accounts that Sel-Sync and the eight-track machine was Ross Snyder of Ampex’s invention. In any event, late 1955 and 1956, Ross Snyder, engineer Mort Fujii and the rest of the Ampex crew worked to overcome the techni-cal hurdles. Finally, in 1957, they delivered the Model 5258, the first one-inch eight-track, to Paul for $10,000—at that time—the price of two nice houses. It was about seven feet tall and weighed more than 250 lbs.17 Ampex called this Selective Synchronous Recording, which they trademarked as Sel-Sync. “[Les]
Paul nicknamed it The Octopus.”18
This was the beginning of a new era in the art of music production: editable, multitrack technology enables producers to paint artificial soundscapes and write scores to a medium that captures precise sounds and nuances of individual per-formances. With editing and overdubbing capability, composition, arrangement, orchestration, performance, and production could truly merge into a single con-tinuum with no clear lines of demarcation. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of this leap forward in recording technology. We take overdubbing for granted today but it forever changed the art of music production, empowering those who produce music by extending their creative control as composers of the sound recording. (It should be noted that in this context the producer may be a
person or team of people, ad hoc or otherwise, and may or may not include a per-son with the title of producer.)
The first eight-track machine was delivered in 1957 but, perhaps because of the expense and the fact that musicians were accustomed to recording together at the same time, the uptake of eight-track machines was relatively slow. Tom Dowd is said to have insisted that Atlantic buy the second 5258 manufactured. Nonetheless, Phil Spector was still using Ampex 350 three-track machines when he recorded his early sixties “Wall of Sound” hits at Gold Star.19 George Martin even recorded The Beatles’ production extravaganza, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, in 1966 and 1967 on four-track machines. Martin used extensive bounces or, as they were then termed, reduction mixes from one machine to another and this was about a decade after Ampex manufactured their first eight-track.
Notwithstanding, Paul’s pioneering work in sound on sound recording that led to multitrack overdubbing was a monumental breakthrough for producers and production. Previously, all sounds that would comprise a final production had to be created simultaneously in the studio in real time. On his and Mary Ford’s many hits Paul played all the guitar parts and Ford sang all the vocals, he conceptualized the tracks, optimized the order of overdubs, ran the machines and had, what seems like, an instant and exhaustive understanding of sound on sound tape techniques.
Paul said, “I knew from the beginning that there was a great marriage between electronics and music.”20
Ampex also produced some three-track machines using half-inch tape. Rumor has it that Capitol studios used one to record Frank Sinatra. Ross Snyder (man-ager of special products, Ampex) told David Sarser (sales man(man-ager, Ampex) that they “delivered a three-track half-inch recorder to Capital Recording for experi-ments even before the Thorn machine.” Sarser believes that “RCA was the first to use it on live classical recordings.” He says he sold a couple of them to RCA stu-dios after their chief engineer told him that “Heifetz swings back and forth when he plays and would pop from the right to the left speaker.” Sarser told him he could solve the problem in the final mix to two-track if he just bought, “. . . one of the three-track machines . . . and put a single mic on the center track.”21 Engineers and producers used the three-track recorders in different ways. Some used them for overdubbing and others to record a stereo image with an important element, such as the vocal(s) on the center track, which allowed for flexibility in mixing.
This was a time of experimentation and, according to Chris Michie, Frank Zappa (at his studio Z) used a staggered head, five-track, half-inch machine built by Paul Buff.22
Eight-track, one-inch recorders did not gain wide acceptance for some years. Nevertheless, once multitracking caught on, high-end studios made the shift to sixteen-track two-inch tape machines and then very quickly moved to twenty-four tracks on two-inch by the mid-seventies. Each of the twenty-four tracks on two-inch tape was one-third narrower than those on sixteen-track (on two-inch tape) or eight-track on one-inch. In fact, track width had remained
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constant on quarter-inch two-tracks, half-inch four-tracks, and so on. For this reason, twenty-four-track machines represented a sonic step backwards in terms of signal-to-noise ratio and crosstalk. Irrespective, artists and produc-ers demanded the creative flexibility of more tracks and, fortunately, technol-ogy in the form of Dolby noise reduction would go some way to compensate for the technically retrograde move to narrower track width. Before long the desire for more tracks drove producers to begin synchronizing two or more twenty-four-track machines together.