It was pointed out in one of my earliest engineering books that modern recording technology was developed mostly through the efforts of three men: Bing Crosby, Les Paul and Adolf Hitler.
Pretty provocative statement, and slightly fudged for effect.
Certainly the Nazis and their espionage specialists developed recording technology significantly for surveillance purposes. Moving the medium to magnetic tape from the old shellac discs or cylinders allowed for massive refinement of recording quality (and while Hitler supported the initiative, I have my doubts he ever fired up a soldering gun or studied a specs sheet himself...). After the war, Bing Crosby toured Europe, and the German reel-to-reel Ampex tape machines were brought to his attention. He took one back to the USA and showed it to his musical collaborator, Les Paul, a guitarist and music technology tinkerer of the best kind.
Les Paul soon discovered that if he recorded the sound of his guitar-playing along with the playback from a recording he'd made earlier, he could effectively clone himself. Soon he was arranging pieces featuring several guitars (all his, of course) and multiple Mary Ford vocal lines, choirs of guitar and voice...performed by only two people. Check out his recording of “How High the Moon”, for example.
Soon afterward, Les Paul built the first multi-track recorders, which divided one length of tape into four parallel “tracks”. This allowed Les to clone himself and his wife using only one machine, and with far less signal loss in the process. In the late eighties (which is when I started spending time around recording devices), recording onto digital hard drives rather than magnetic tape became affordable enough for hobbyists to explore. At the University of Victoria, we still recorded on half- and quarter-inch reel-to-reel tape (4- and 8-track) – and my first recording device was a Tascam 244 cassette-tape 4-track. The manual was written by Tolstoy. The earliest incarnation of my band, Victoria Secret, recorded on 24-track 2-inch tape at Zero Gravity Studios – definitely the autumn years of tape. Some artists (Slash, for example) still hold out stubbornly with magnetic tape, claiming it sounds warmer – but the medium is quickly vanishing. Digital is just so convenient, and only the keenest of ears (if, indeed, anyone) can hear the difference between a magnetic recording and a digital one.
I embraced digital recording fully in 2006, when I purchased a digital 16-track Yamaha recorder. Until recently, I've recorded absolutely everything on it, and felt only limited by its output options (everything must be burned onto CD – no USB out. Curses!) and my own yet-to-learn's as an engineer. I've grown very comfortable doing everything myself, I've developed some quick-and-efficient techniques for getting good sounds, and I've learned a hell of a lot. Still, time and technology march on...
The band is currently polishing off a three-song EP in a very well-appointed home studio in North Vancouver. For the first time in a decade, I'm not engineering this one. Because the medium is digital, this allows for computer software to step in and do huge engineering tasks that were unheard of until the '90's. Not surprisingly, we're using the ubiquitous Pro Tools multi-track recording software, and our award-winning engineer, Bud Arnold, has hand-in-glove familiarity with the latest version.
The biggest difference between this Pro Tools approach and the way I'd do it at home is at the editing stage. At home, if I laid down a track of, say, lead vocals, and I feel I goofed a couple of phrases of an otherwise good performance, I would “punch in” the correction just by setting the start and finish time of the spot I wanted to record over, and record the corrected phrases. In North Van, we tend to take four passes at, say, lead vocals. Of the four performances, we listen to each performance phrase-by-phrase, selecting (and very occasionally arguing over) which phrase we like best of the four. We then paste together one complete performance from that collection of our favourite phrases (I could technically do this in my home studio as well, but the process would be far more cumbersome). Bud's skill with Pro Tools allows him to stitch together a complete composite performance quickly and seamlessly.
It's taken a bit of getting used to relinquishing my little aural autocracy and performing in front of others while recording. There's a little more pressure, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. As we haven't reached the end of this project and therefore have no final results, my jury's still out on whether this approach to recording is a step forward for us. I can at least say that I've been blown away, yet again, by the musicianship of my two band mates and the hugely artful expertise of our engineer. One of the three tunes we've recorded, “Villains Anonymous”, had never even been rehearsed together as a band, let alone played live, and I was completely floored by everyone's contributions. This is the first recording I've made with someone other than me on bass for almost a decade, and to say I was pleasantly surprised by Jason's work is a massive understatement. I definitely look forward to hearing the finished works.
With a fair quantity of formal training in Classical and (to a far lesser degree) Jazz, and an enduring love for bands that can deliver the goods live, the purist in me isn't entirely comfortable with these new Pro Tools of recording. In the days before Bing brought the Ampex machines back from the remains of Germany, recording required a near-perfect performance from all musicians simultaneously. If someone messed up, the engineer would have to throw out the recording cylinder or shellac disc and load a new one for the next attempt. Back then, all recordings were essentially live. All musicians had to deliver the goods at once. Just like on stage.
I do take some comfort in the knowledge that we haven't required all of Pro Tools' capabilities. There is no auto-tune/pitch correction, drum re-placement, side-chain compression, or even frequency equalizing or effects used. While there may be a touch of reverb and delay in the final mix, that will likely be all the artifice we'll employ. It's not live, but it's honest – probably more so than most current pop/rock recordings. In the meantime, it's been suggested that we record one of our live performances one of these days. I'd certainly be game. I can guarantee it won't be a perfect performance (as there's no such thing), but again – it will be honest. Like those pre-WWII recording musicians, we'll just have to get it right – but at least we won't have to toss out our hard-drive if we balls it up.
Pretty provocative statement, and slightly fudged for effect.
Certainly the Nazis and their espionage specialists developed recording technology significantly for surveillance purposes. Moving the medium to magnetic tape from the old shellac discs or cylinders allowed for massive refinement of recording quality (and while Hitler supported the initiative, I have my doubts he ever fired up a soldering gun or studied a specs sheet himself...). After the war, Bing Crosby toured Europe, and the German reel-to-reel Ampex tape machines were brought to his attention. He took one back to the USA and showed it to his musical collaborator, Les Paul, a guitarist and music technology tinkerer of the best kind.
Les Paul soon discovered that if he recorded the sound of his guitar-playing along with the playback from a recording he'd made earlier, he could effectively clone himself. Soon he was arranging pieces featuring several guitars (all his, of course) and multiple Mary Ford vocal lines, choirs of guitar and voice...performed by only two people. Check out his recording of “How High the Moon”, for example.
Soon afterward, Les Paul built the first multi-track recorders, which divided one length of tape into four parallel “tracks”. This allowed Les to clone himself and his wife using only one machine, and with far less signal loss in the process. In the late eighties (which is when I started spending time around recording devices), recording onto digital hard drives rather than magnetic tape became affordable enough for hobbyists to explore. At the University of Victoria, we still recorded on half- and quarter-inch reel-to-reel tape (4- and 8-track) – and my first recording device was a Tascam 244 cassette-tape 4-track. The manual was written by Tolstoy. The earliest incarnation of my band, Victoria Secret, recorded on 24-track 2-inch tape at Zero Gravity Studios – definitely the autumn years of tape. Some artists (Slash, for example) still hold out stubbornly with magnetic tape, claiming it sounds warmer – but the medium is quickly vanishing. Digital is just so convenient, and only the keenest of ears (if, indeed, anyone) can hear the difference between a magnetic recording and a digital one.
I embraced digital recording fully in 2006, when I purchased a digital 16-track Yamaha recorder. Until recently, I've recorded absolutely everything on it, and felt only limited by its output options (everything must be burned onto CD – no USB out. Curses!) and my own yet-to-learn's as an engineer. I've grown very comfortable doing everything myself, I've developed some quick-and-efficient techniques for getting good sounds, and I've learned a hell of a lot. Still, time and technology march on...
The band is currently polishing off a three-song EP in a very well-appointed home studio in North Vancouver. For the first time in a decade, I'm not engineering this one. Because the medium is digital, this allows for computer software to step in and do huge engineering tasks that were unheard of until the '90's. Not surprisingly, we're using the ubiquitous Pro Tools multi-track recording software, and our award-winning engineer, Bud Arnold, has hand-in-glove familiarity with the latest version.
The biggest difference between this Pro Tools approach and the way I'd do it at home is at the editing stage. At home, if I laid down a track of, say, lead vocals, and I feel I goofed a couple of phrases of an otherwise good performance, I would “punch in” the correction just by setting the start and finish time of the spot I wanted to record over, and record the corrected phrases. In North Van, we tend to take four passes at, say, lead vocals. Of the four performances, we listen to each performance phrase-by-phrase, selecting (and very occasionally arguing over) which phrase we like best of the four. We then paste together one complete performance from that collection of our favourite phrases (I could technically do this in my home studio as well, but the process would be far more cumbersome). Bud's skill with Pro Tools allows him to stitch together a complete composite performance quickly and seamlessly.
It's taken a bit of getting used to relinquishing my little aural autocracy and performing in front of others while recording. There's a little more pressure, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. As we haven't reached the end of this project and therefore have no final results, my jury's still out on whether this approach to recording is a step forward for us. I can at least say that I've been blown away, yet again, by the musicianship of my two band mates and the hugely artful expertise of our engineer. One of the three tunes we've recorded, “Villains Anonymous”, had never even been rehearsed together as a band, let alone played live, and I was completely floored by everyone's contributions. This is the first recording I've made with someone other than me on bass for almost a decade, and to say I was pleasantly surprised by Jason's work is a massive understatement. I definitely look forward to hearing the finished works.
With a fair quantity of formal training in Classical and (to a far lesser degree) Jazz, and an enduring love for bands that can deliver the goods live, the purist in me isn't entirely comfortable with these new Pro Tools of recording. In the days before Bing brought the Ampex machines back from the remains of Germany, recording required a near-perfect performance from all musicians simultaneously. If someone messed up, the engineer would have to throw out the recording cylinder or shellac disc and load a new one for the next attempt. Back then, all recordings were essentially live. All musicians had to deliver the goods at once. Just like on stage.
I do take some comfort in the knowledge that we haven't required all of Pro Tools' capabilities. There is no auto-tune/pitch correction, drum re-placement, side-chain compression, or even frequency equalizing or effects used. While there may be a touch of reverb and delay in the final mix, that will likely be all the artifice we'll employ. It's not live, but it's honest – probably more so than most current pop/rock recordings. In the meantime, it's been suggested that we record one of our live performances one of these days. I'd certainly be game. I can guarantee it won't be a perfect performance (as there's no such thing), but again – it will be honest. Like those pre-WWII recording musicians, we'll just have to get it right – but at least we won't have to toss out our hard-drive if we balls it up.