In the first episode of our brief history of recording, we explained how we went from wax to tape, gaining a host of creative possibilities along the way. But the journey was far from over: less than 50 years ago, you needed an entire room full of gear to do what a simple Zoom H2n can handle today—talk about a long road! Read on to see how we got here…
Although the process existed in embryonic forms since the 1930s, the first stereo records only appeared in the late 1950s—and these classical recordings were reserved for avid audiophiles who needed a new playback system to support the format. Radio, of course, broadcast in mono. Stereo wasn’t used for pop records until the mid-1960s, when the style became commercially dominant. The format only started to be mastered toward the end of the decade; before that, early stereo mixes often sounded downright odd—think all instruments on the left and the lone vocal on the right. Gradually, pop pushed technical boundaries to deliver fresh sonic experiences: sounds panned from one side of the stereo image to the other; tapes were run backwards, slowed down (lower pitch), or sped up (higher pitch), creating tones that don’t exist in nature. And then, of course, multitrack recording arrived…
Don’t All Talk at Once
Multitrack recording is so obvious today that it’s hard to imagine a time when it didn’t exist. But before the 1950s, every instrument had to record at the same time. Ampex created the first multitrack recorder in 1955, and jazz guitarist Les Paul was the first to craft astonishing recordings with it: he could accompany his own solos, double his riffs, and his wife Mary Ford harmonized with herself in three or four parts. Recording changed in nature completely—it became an art form in its own right. The goal was no longer to reproduce what you heard in the room as faithfully as possible, but to invent sounds that fire the listener’s imagination. You could add numerous instruments without paying extra musicians, and even juxtapose an orchestra with a rock band—something that would have posed major acoustic problems had they played in the same room at the same time.
The Proliferation of Little Tracks
Multitrack spreads through studios, expanding from 4 to 8 tracks, then on to 16 and 24 tracks. Of course, before this gradual increase, engineers relied on tricks to work around the limitations of the original 4-track. The classic move was to submix the 4 filled tracks down to 2 tracks on another 4-track machine (2 rather than 1 to preserve the stereo image), which freed up 2 tracks to add more instruments. You could repeat this process multiple times to gain more tracks, but it meant making mix decisions for those bounced parts before hearing the full arrangement—since every time 4 tracks were turned into 2, you lost the ability to adjust the levels of the “reduced” tracks. Not to mention that with every pass from one machine to another, tape hiss increased…
A Trident Sound
The 1960s also saw a boom in independent studios, whereas previously the recording studio was the domain of the record label (Capitol in the U.S., EMI in the U.K., to name two). In London, for example, Trident Studios opened in 1968 and even hosted EMI’s biggest artists like the Beatles (who recorded “Hey Jude” there, taking advantage of an 8-track recorder while Abbey Road still had only 4), David Bowie, and Queen. Studios continued to build their own gear (the Trident consoles are still a benchmark today), but outboard brands gradually took hold. Neumann and AKG ruled the microphone world, and in 1961 Rupert Neve founded Neve Electronics, offering his consoles to British studios. In 1969, Solid State Logic followed suit. To this day, SSL remains the most widespread console brand in high-end studios.
Numbers and Letters
The last great recording revolution was digital. The Compact Disc arrived in 1982 and established itself as a solid, reliable, and more faithful playback medium than vinyl. It was also the first digital playback format, though it still reproduced analog recordings made on tape. Despite his rootsy bluesman image, guitarist and singer Ry Cooder was the first to make an album on a digital recorder—Bop ’Til You Drop in 1979. In the 1980s, digital keyboards and the MIDI format became the norm, and the famed Synclavier offered hard-disk recording—but at a sky-high price. We’d have to wait for the NAMM show in 1991 to see the ADAT format unveiled: a digital tape that became the standard and ushered the 1990s into the land of zeros and ones. Also in 1991, a piece of software that would change the world made its debut: Pro Tools. The revolution wasn’t instant—computers didn’t fully take over studios until the late ’90s—but once they did, it became possible to edit audio with far greater precision than tape ever allowed. No more razor blades—just a mouse—and you could “fix” virtually any mistake with surgical accuracy. From then on, music was as much something you looked at as listened to, with engineers constantly staring at the waveforms of the various tracks.
Mini Mini Mini
These days, recording is still done to hard disk, and little has changed on that front. The real revolution isn’t the technology itself but its price and footprint: you can now have a 4-track studio with two built-in mics for 244 euros and 280 grams (the Zoom H4n for those who didn’t catch the hint), and even smartphones offer multitrack capabilities (8 tracks in GarageBand, 24 in the Multitrack DAW app). Sure, it’s a lot less romantic than a vintage C12 plugged into a Studer tape machine, but unless you have deep pockets—and, more importantly, serious technical chops (analog gear’s party trick is breaking down, especially if it isn’t meticulously maintained)—it’s hard not to celebrate the radical democratization of recording tools. We’ve even reached the curious idea of emulating vintage machines with digital plug-ins—and the crazy part is, it works! Whatever the format, the idea hasn’t changed through the ages: capture a musical moment that can be replayed on demand to delight a listener.
