A History Of Recording Studios

From the 1880's onward record studios were very basic place. Microphones, electrical recording / amplification devices were just not around. Essentially an early record studio was basically a quiet location or a big enough position to get all the players and their instruments - such as an vacant ballroom. They would gather round a portable recording instrument such as a phonographic horn and the recording would be put straight onto disc using a straight cutting process.

The sound from the musicians would be channeled through a phonographic horn - this would go to a mechanical lathe which would inscribe the noise directly onto the surface of the medium such as a cylinder or disc.

Mechanical acoustic recordings were replaced in the mid 20's following the invention and commercial introduction of the microphone, electronic amplifier, mixing desk and the loudspeaker, and by the beginning of the 30's acoustic recording was completely unused.

The majority of recording in the early 30's was now electrical recording. Mastering lathes were even now still being used - although alternatively powered by electricity, the masters were still going to be cut direct-to-disc. Music of this generation was still predominantly large symphony orchestras or other large instrumental ensembles. Engineers soon found that significant, reverberant places like concert halls and converted churches produced a lively acoustic signature that significantly enhanced the sound of the recording, and in this stage, significant acoustically live halls were preferred, rather than the acoustically dull booths and studio rooms that became common after the 60's.

Because of the confines of the recording machinery, studios of the mid 20th century were designed around the concept of grouping artists and singers, rather than keeping them apart, and placing the performers and the microphones purposefully to capture the complex acoustic and harmonic interplay that emerged during the piece.

Electric recording studios in the middle of the 20th century often lacked isolation booths, baffles (sound absorbers), and sometimes even speakers, and it was not until the 60s, with the inauguration of the high-fidelity earphones that it became common practice for artists to use earphones to supervise their performance during recording and listen to playbacks.

It was hard to separate all the artists—a major reason that this practice was not used was simply because recordings were usually made as live ensemble 'takes' and all the performers needed to be able to see each other and the ensemble leader while playing. The recording engineers who trained in this period learned to take advantage of the complex acoustic effects that might be produced through leakage between different microphones and groups of instruments, and these technicians became exceptionally skilled at capturing the distinctive acoustic properties of their studios and the artists in performance.

In the 60's, engineers began experimenting by placing microphones much closer to instruments than had previously been the norm...in fact so much so that microphones were almost inside the mouth of the brass instruments such as the horn and saxaphone.

The exclusive sonic characteristics of the chief studios imparted a special character to many of the most famous popular recordings of the 50's and 60's, and the recording companies jealously guarded these facilities. When various famous locations were taken over - cleaners were instructed not to remove old curtains, not to wash floors and walls in case the structural dynamics were changed and the sound was lost forever.

There were several other features of studios in this period that contributed to their distinctive sonic signatures. As well as the inherent sound of the major recording rooms, many of the best studios incorporated specially-designed echo chambers, purpose-built rooms which were often built beneath the main studio.

These were typically long, low down rectangular spaces constructed from hard, sound-reflective materials similar to concrete, fitted with a loudspeaker at one end and one or more microphones at the other. During a recording session, a signal from one or more of the microphones in the studio could be routed to the loudspeaker in the echo chamber; the sound from the speaker reverberated through the chamber and the enhanced signal was picked up by the microphone at the other end. This echo-enhanced signal—which was often used to sweeten the sound of vocals—could then be blended in with the main signal from the microphone in the studio and mixed into the track as the master recording was being made.

Special equipment was another notable feature of the classic recording studio. The biggest studios were owned and operated by large media companies like RCA, Columbia and EMI, who typically had their own electronics r&d divisions that designed and built bespoke recording equipment and mixing consoles for their studios.

During the 50's and 60's the sound of pop recordings was further defined by the introduction of proprietary sound processing devices such as equalizers and compressors, which were made by specialist electronics companies. One of the best known of these was the famous Pultec equalizer, which was used by almost all the major business studios of the time.

With the introduction of multi-track(multitracking) recording, it became achievable to record musicians and vocalists separately and at different times on different tracks on tape, although it was not until the 70's that the large recording companies began to adopt this procedure commonly, and throughout the Sixties many pop classics were still recorded live in a one-off take.

After the Sixties the emphasis shifted to isolation and sound-proofing, with treatments like echo and reverberation added separately during the mixing process, rather than being blended in during the recording. One regrettable outcome of this trend, which coincided with rising inner-city property values, was that many of the prevalent studios were either knocked down or redeveloped for alternative uses.

In the mid 20th century, recordings were analog, prepared on quarter-inch or half-inch magnetic tape, with multitrack recording reaching 8 tracks in the 50's, 16 tracks in late 60's, and 32 tracks in the early 70's. The commonest such tape is the 2-inch analog, capable of containing up to 24 individual tracks. Normally, after an audio mix is set up on a 24-track tape machine, the signal is played back and sent to a different machine, which records the combined signals (called printing) to a half-inch 2-track stereo tape, called a master.

Before digital recording, the whole number of available tracks onto which one could record was measured in multiples of 24, based on the number of 24-track tape technology being used. Most recording studios now use digital recording equipment, which limits the number of available tracks only on the basis of the mixing console's or computer hardware interface's capacity and the ability of the hardware to cope with processing demands.

Analog tape machines are in spite of everything well sought; for some purists label digitally recorded audio as sounding too harsh, and the rarity and age of analog tape machines greatly increases their value, as does the fact that many audio engineers still insist on recording only to analog tape. This harshness is wrongly attributed by a number of to the belief that digital recording will sample a sound wave many times per second allowing an illusion of fixed sound waves to be created, where in contrast analog tape captures a sound wave in its entirety.

By: Paul Stanton

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