A History of Recording Studios

From the late 19th century record studios were very basic place. Microphones, electrical recording / amplification devices were just not around. Essentially an early record studio was basically a quiet site or a big enough place to get all the musicians and their instruments - such as an empty ballroom. They would gather round a movable recording instrument such as a phonographic horn and the sound would be put straight onto disc using a direct cutting process.

The noise 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 early 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 substantial instrumental ensembles. Engineers soon found that large, reverberant spaces like concert halls and converted churches produced a brilliant acoustic signature that intensely enhanced the sound of the recording, and in this phase, large acoustically live halls were preferred, rather than the acoustically dead booths and studio rooms that became a regular occurence after the 60's.

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

Electric recording studios in the mid-20th century often lacked isolation booths, baffles (sound absorbers), and sometimes even speakers, and it was not until the 60s, with the induction of the high-fidelity headphones that it became common practice for musicians to use headset to keep an eye on their performance during recording and listen to playbacks.

It was complicated to isolate all the performers 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 intricate acoustic effects that may possibly be created through leakage between different microphones and groups of instruments, and these technicians became really skilled at capturing the unique 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 practically inside the mouth of the brass instruments such as the horn and saxaphone.

The unique sonic characteristics of the most important 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 bought out - 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 many other features of studios in this period that contributed to their inimitable sonic signatures. As well as the inherent sound of the most important 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 places made from hard, sound-reflective materials like concrete, built-in 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 key signal from the microphone in the studio and mixed into the track as the master recording was being produced.

Special equipment was another notable feature of the classic recording studio. The biggest studios were owned and operated by substantial media companies like RCA, Columbia and EMI, who typically had their own electronics research and development 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 profit-making studios of the time.

With the introduction of multi-track(multitracking) recording, it became doable 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 practice extensively, and throughout the Sixties many pop classics were still recorded live in a single 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 largest 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. Generally, 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 complete number of available tracks onto which one could record was measured in multiples of 24, based on the number of 24-track tape machines 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 scarcity 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 incorrectly attributed by a number of to the belief that digital recording will sample a sound wave many times per second allowing an illusion of solid sound waves to be formed, where in contrast analog tape captures a sound wave in its entirety.

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