Technology in music series; (part 1) from one mic to 128 tracks (I)

Amusic industry expert and acclaimed author, Hank Bordowitz, shares his story about the role technology has played in music throughout history; and he goes on to say:

I met Frank Fillipetti while he was working as an engineer on Foreigner’s Agent Provocateur at Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village in New York. We got to know each other, not because I had been an engineer, but because I was managing a music and video store about a block from the studio on Sixth Avenue. He would rent four or five videos at a time for his wife, who was ailing, while he tracked the album. He became a regular, and once when I asked him for a progress report (on Foreigner, not his wife), he told me that he wasn’t sure. They had been working for nearly a year, twelve hours a day, and he really didn’t feel any closer to finishing than he had six months earlier. The process eventually took about a year and a half.

I mentioned this to Todd Rundgren some time later on. “Some people think that unless it takes a certain amount of time, it isn’t good,” he said.

That’s not necessarily true. I don’t know how many times people have done their best take on the first take, if you can ignore the glaring errors. Then, what happens is people try to get rid of the errors; they concentrate more on precision and less and less on performance. It may be more perfectly played, but the feel of it will be less pleasant, less human.

You have to realise that by the time the second month rolls around, you’re not looking forward to it any more. You’re supposed to be creating pleasurable and meaningful stuff, and what happens is it’s the last thing in the world you want to do, to go into the studio and go through that grind again. I don’t comprehend it myself, but I guess the ends can justify the means. If anybody does it and they manage to get the sales, that’s fine.

“A lot of guys couldn’t possibly think that way,” Les Paul, inventor of the multi-track technology, noted about the trend to cold, faultless recording. “They let it go until they get it perfect with no feeling.”

In the early days, this was not possible. The entire nature of recording was different. Of course the record company wanted the best sounding, best-recorded music. But up until the very late 1940s, everything had to be recorded direct to disc (remember, the tape recorder really didn’t even come to these shores before 1946). If someone made a mistake, the engineer in the control room had to scrap the transcription disk and start over. It behoved the musicians not to make mistakes, to get it right the first time. To achieve that, the producers relied on great musicians, some rehearsal, and good charts. Sessions only lasted three hours back then, with the objective of leaving the studio with three or four serviceable sides.

“The whole point,” said Mitch Miller, who spent a lot of time making these recordings as an artist, A&R man, and ultimately president of Columbia Records, “was to be ready when you did the take. Otherwise, it became an exercise in exhaustion. Nobody wanted to be the one who screwed up the record.”

Initially, in the days of the wax cylinder, recordings weren’t even made electronically; captured acoustic energy dug the grooves into the wax. One of the hardest aspects of recording then was arranging the musicians to achieve the balance that would present the music at its optimum. When electronic recording and transcription were initially introduced, there was still only one microphone, so the musicians all had to arrange themselves toward that one locus. Even the initial tape recorders were monaural and so were the records that were made on them – though tape certainly offered a less expensive, simpler means of recording than cutting a disc on a lathe, especially when it came to multiple takes.

The tape recorder led to a major economic shift in the record business. No longer did each track involve cutting a master. Now, recording merely required some relatively inexpensive tape, and bad takes could either be fast-forwarded over or erased entirely. With the advent of the LP, as Robert Shelton pointed out earlier, suddenly the perceived value of recorded music shot up even as the cost of producing it came down. This spurred some 133 new independent record companies to open for business by 1952.