Technology in music series; (part 3) from one mic to 128 tracks (III)

Four-track recording became de rigueur around 1964. With each subsequent bump in technology, the process of making a record became both potentially more complex and, consequently, more time consuming and costly. In 1971, Beatles producer George Martin said:

I cannot see the need for any more than sixteen tracks for recording. In building our new studios in the center of London, I had to decide how sophisticated our facilities should be, and while 24 and 32 tracks are possible, I think it makes the whole business of recording far too expensive. Multi-track recording does not give you a better sound; it only postpones the moment of truth and then you have to decide what your mix is going to be.

I use 16-track quite a lot because I have all these facilities at [my own] AIR Studios, but I would be quite happy with less. Sorry to repeat myself on [the Beatles’ Sgt.] Pepper, but I think it is worthwhile mentioning that this was done on four track. I think the main point about recording studios today is that they should provide modern facilities instantly and with great comfort so that the artist is made to feel at home. After that, it is up to the artist and the producer.

If you have never seen a 16-track recording console, it looks something like the controls for a spaceship, and while each track has essentially the same controls, depending on the board these controls can look intimidating and off-putting. The recording engineer’s job is making sense of this world of gear and getting sound from one place to another place as transparently (to everyone else) as possible.

However, progress didn’t stop at 16 tracks. By the early 1990s in the Power Station recording studio, a room geared for sound for the film industry had in excess of 100 tracks on a recording console that was over 16 feet wide. “I started when four track was in,” noted the Power Station’s owner, Tony Bongiovi, “Through 8-track, 16, 24, and 32. In my generation, I spent a lot of time in the studio. I watched the technical side of our industry evolve.” Pictured below is a 48-track console.

The problem for each particular studio is striking the correct balance. How much equipment does the studio need to own? How much can it rent at the client’s behest and expense without losing the client? Can a facility be state of the art and charge top-line prices, or can it book enough hours with equipment merely adequate to the client’s needs and still turn a profit? How does a studio bring in the clients in the first place? How much needs to be spent on advertising and promotion to keep the room or rooms filled?

When the expert cut his teeth as an engineer at a small eight-track studio in Manhattan, he says: we faced these challenges on a daily basis. The studio had a good-to-great location in a relatively shabby building on 49th Street, by Eighth Avenue, with a rehearsal studio two floors above us. Sadly, the owner proved not much of a business man (he initially opened the studio in the hope of promoting his own musical career through the record company attached to the studio), and after expanding to 16 tracks, then renting out the space for video production, eventually the sheriff came around, chained the door, and auctioned off the contents for non-payment to any number of creditors.

In the recording studio business, this is a pretty familiar scenario. “We invested millions of dollars into the business,” noted another studio owner as he shut his doors and sold off his assets, “only to turn around and charge peanuts. We did 85 percent booking at full rate, which must be a record, so we really couldn’t make it better. We reached the top for us, and the top wasn’t good enough.”

The trouble at this studio began when the console it installed, one of the first of that particular kind in its city, became commonplace. Then the console company started to lower the price of the console – the cost of being an early adapter. Said the studio owner of people in his position, “You never win. You put in [a console] and you sell your room for $2,000. Then the next guy puts one in and charges $1,800. Then the next guy charges $1,600.”

Producer, artist, and studio owner Larry Fast noted:

During the heyday of big-format studios like the Record Plant, Power Station, Hit Factory, Media Sound, etc. – all now gone out of business – the big console and tape machine manufacturers extended easy credit at the prevailing interest rates (9 – 13 percent) to buy (actually infinitely lease) their products. They flooded the market with product, but their money was made on the lease-to-buy arrangements where a $750,000 console could easily cost $2 million over the life of the lease. And they’d sell to anyone, forcing rate wars among the studios which the labels leveraged to drive their own recording budgets downward.

An illustrative example from House of Music: In 1976 we had an MCI console on lease purchase, which cost $60,000. We could get a book rate of $200 an hour for studio A. As you can imagine other costs for staff health coverage, property taxes, energy, etc. were pretty low by comparison back then. By 1994, we had a $600,000 Neve “V” series console in that studio and were lucky to get the labels to cough up $80 an hour. Other costs had gone through the roof. The biggest monthly hit was to Neve’s parent organisation, Siemen’s Financial Services, which held the lease purchase paper.