Technology in music series; (part 2) from one mic to 128 tracks (II)

But as in Miller’s day, it was important that the artists came in prepared. Sessions for a recording were still a matter of hours rather than a matter of days or weeks. As legendary English producer and manager Mickie Most recalled of his first recording with the Animals, circa 1964:

I paid for the production of the records. Of course in those days they weren’t that expensive… . The Animals’ first record was “House of the Rising Sun.” They had been playing it onstage. You’d have to be deaf not to hear that as a hit record. It was magic and we made the record. They had been on tour with Chuck Berry, and they took an all-night train. We picked them up at seven fifteen in the morning.

Took their equipment and them in a truck around to the recording studio. We started recording at around eight o’clock in the morning and by eight fifteen, “The House of the Rising Sun” was finished. The studio cost eight pounds an hour, which was about twenty dollars in those days. And we recorded the song in fifteen minutes, so you’re talking about five dollars. And because they were scheduled to catch a twelve thirty train to Southampton to continue with the tour, I said, “Let’s do an album.” We finished the album by eleven, and they made their twelve thirty train.

For Les Paul, however, this would not do. Paul’s career spans almost the entire history of sound recording, from “gouging a record like a farmer with an ox” with transcription turntables to building and recording in modern digital studios. Early on, he came up with the idea of “sound on sound,” playing one track onto one transcription turntable then plugging his electric guitar (another of his innovations) and the first turntable into a second turntable and playing along with the first transcription to add a track.

In the process, he broke another bit of prevailing conventional audio engineering wisdom: since he was the only recording, he decided it was silly to stand three feet from the microphone. He moved it to six inches away and found that the sound he got was a lot cleaner – the technique is now called “close micing.” He found that it worked even when he was recording several people. And he discovered that if he put several microphones into a preamplifier, each with its own volume control, he could close mic a bunch of people at the same time. In such ways, he improved the sound of records.

However, some of his biggest innovations came with the advent of tape. Already legendary for his technical prowess, Paul procured one of the first tape recorders to come to the United States. Immediately, he started tinkering with it, putting in an extra record head so he could do sound on sound with just a machine. However, that method was risky. If he made a serious mistake at any time, he had to start the whole thing over. This is illustrated by a scene in the film The Buddy Holly Story in which Holly, after crediting Les Paul for the idea, blows a sound-on-sound dub, causing the band to have to go back and do the initial track again.

In answer to this problem of his own making, Paul came up with another. Instead of recording with the head onto what had already been recorded, how about stacking several tape heads together and then recording onto different areas of a larger tape? He took this idea to Ampex. What it came up with Paul affectionately nicknamed “the Octopus and the Monster.” An eight-track mixer with a set of eight cables (the “octopus”) leading to a six-foot-tall set of pre-amplifiers that attached to a reel-to-reel tape machine with a two-inch-tall tape head where the quarter-inch head used to be, that transported an oversized reel of two-inch-thick (as opposed to quarter-inch-thick) tape.

For many years, however, if you wanted to use an eight-track recorder, you had to venture to Paul’s home and studio in Mahwah, New Jersey. The Beatles’ first studio recordings, nearly a decade after Paul’s studio was up and running (albeit not quite debugged), were still done on a three-track recorder at Abbey Road. They would play live in the studio, using Paul’s multiple close micing, onto two tracks, and the third track could be used to fill in anything else or to “bounce” the first two tracks – taking the material on those tracks and mixing them to the open track – giving the group two additional tracks on which to record. As a famous engineer and producer once said, “Who needs more than three tracks?”