Four-page article from the popular press circa 1960 which claims to describe the work of a recording engineer of the day. “Three complete stereo channels with a fader for each finger!”
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Every House Has A Mic
Any old house, on any street;
any house where a family lived, where life happened;
deep in the basement, perhaps; isolated: its partner the Tape Recorder long gone, a likely early-casualty of its own mechanical complexity;
buried among the sawdust, the poorly chosen xmas gifts, the (few or many) power tools. The microphone is inevitable, and it persists.
It’s probably not very fancy or sophisticated;
just the most basic object necessary to reliably convert sound-pressure into an electrical signal; two for stereo, if purchased after 196X (got to be realistic, right? life is in stereo?).
An old house without a microphone would be an unthinkable as an old house without photographs. Whatever it is that drives us to take all those pictures also drives us to capture moments of life via the sound that surrounds us, the sound that we swim in, sound that you can’t escape by something as easy as closing your eyes. Like the camera, the microphone is a crucial tool in the ritual process of memory-enhancement and posterity-creation; the very presence of the microphone at certain moments serves to create the discourse of ‘significance’ that we have come to expect at certain moments of life. The microphone is an index of significance, of remembering, and of the desire to remember. To discard or destroy it would be very difficult. And so it persists.
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In The Studio
Another day of live tracking at Gold Coast Recorders. Vocal chain working great: Neumann U47 fet into Neve console pre into (gentle) distessor; vocalist needs to be pretty tight on the mic due to the drums, Hammond, and Super Reverb live in the room with her. Behind the U47 is a Turner U99 dynamic amplified by one of my Altec 1566 -based mic preamps. The perfect pairing of hi-fi & pristine / dirty and lowdown. If you have ever thought about building your own vacuum-tube mic preamp, the Altec 1566 is a great place to start. Here’s where I first learned about them. The 1566 is not a very clean preamp, but wow they sound great for drum fronts, toughening up acoustic gtr, etc. We have 3 of them at GCR and they get a lot of use. I recommend Edcor transformers for the output and power; Jensen 115 for input.
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In The Studio
Preservation Sound dot com will be less active this week because I have 7 days of back-to-back sessions booked at Gold Coast Recorders. The first 5 days are live full-ensemble tracking and editing. Electric string player (gtr/bass/sitar), Hammond organist, two percussionists, and one vocalist.
The Fender Super Reverb, circa 1969; perhaps the best guitar amplifier ever made; also used for bass on many of the greatest hits of the 1960s via C. Kaye. Mic’d with the can’t-fail combination of a close SM57 and a ribbon mic a few feet off; in this case, a Shinybox 46MXL, IMO one of the best values in a current-production microphone.
Gold Coast Recorders has a circa 1960 Hammond L-101 (at right), which sonically splits the difference between a classic Hammond tonewheel sound and a voltage-divider organ (e.g., a Farfisa). What it lacks in sonic heft it more-than-makes up for with the amazing psychedelic effects-option board you see installed at the lower right. On the Left is GCR’s new Hammond A100, which is the same thing as a B3 except that it has built-in speakers and a reverb section. We’re using it with a Leslie 51.
Percussion via several Sennhesier 441s and an AKG 414 overhead. Room is mic’d with an XY pair of Neuman TLM 103s, a great choice for room mics owing to their incredibly low self-noise and very high output.
As I wrote on day 1, the goal of this website is to investigate “the potential (of sound-altering audio technologies) to create meaning for the people who experience these new sounds.” This can be as broad as audio-tape domesticating and institutionalizing surveillance, or a limited as attempting to decode the visual language of different electric guitar models (via my endless uploads of obscure vintage guitar paper items) and attempting to understand how, if at all, that certain vintage microphone preamp design really does make a tangible difference in the effect of a recording. Through it all, though, what’s crucial to me is the idea that /we make tools to serve certain ends/ …and then (also)… /our tools create and dictate our behavior/. It’s this dynamic that I find fascinating about any technology, any medium… since I work in sound + music, I investigate it on this particular plane.
I was recently reminded where this idea comes from; or at least how it first came to me; I was reminded that it stems from the writings of Marshall McLuhan, via books of his I picked up at various library-book-sales while in high school. McLuhan was an academic and a media critic, but in the highly progressive and experimental time that was the late 1960s, he was able to cross over into the popular sphere, and the many millions of copies of his books in circulation guaranteed that any curious kid would find them eventually. Not long after I first discovered McLuhan, I was off to college where I would study semiotics and cultural theory (along with music); McLuhan was rarely mentioned in my courses. I can’t recall why this was, but he was not part of the program. Nonetheless, the basic premise of McLuhan’s theories: ‘We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us’: this is parallel to the most basic principle of semiotics; the idea that /language does not describe that which is in the world/, but rather /we can only understand and ‘see’ the world through the filter of language/. To put it another way: language is essentially limiting. And: our tools do not ‘let us do whatever we want to do,’ but instead limit and in some cases dictate what we do.
Our friends J+C visited recently; C manages a bookstore and is therefore very up-to-date on the latest publications. C mentioned that Douglas Coupland recently wrote a book on Marshall McLuhan; I am a big fan of both of these writers so this is great news to me. NEways… a few days later, McLuhan and Coupland popped up again in this NYT article. McLuhan is apparently experiencing a resurrection in academic circles. At the university where I teach, E and I are the only faculty to teach semiotics, so I don’t know how true this as; but much like everything comes-around in music, I imagine certain thinkers can regain a footing in academia.
I realize that this post has absolutely nothing to do with audio in particular, but MM has everything to do with why I think it’s interesting and important to look closer at the audio tools and technology that we use, and to (at least) try to understand how these tools and technologies interact with our work and our creative goals. You can find a copy of his Understanding Media virtually anywhere.
Continuing our series on Carvin Musical Instruments of the 1970s: the complete Carvin electric guitar line-up of 1978. Download a twelve-page scan of the 1978 catalog:
DOWNLOAD: Carvin_guitars_1978
Products on offer include: Carvin DC150C, DC150B, CM140, CM130, and CM120 electric guitars; the Carvin CB100 stereo bass, and the DT630 and DB630 doubleneck instruments.
By 1978, Carvin had abandoned the slightly Fender-influenced European-made guitar components they had been using since the late 60s; the 1978 lineup is much more Gibson influenced; or maybe Gibson-by-way-of-Alembic. Noteable late-70s trends at work here include: solid brass hardware; heavier (8.5 lbs) instruments; humbucking pickups with coil taps; ‘natural’ finishes; and plentiful control knobs/switches ala Alembic and BC Rich.
One odd holdout from the earlier era of the electric-guitar is the fact that these instruments shipped with a guitar-cable included. I wonder when this practice finally ended. Seems like a cable more ought to come with an amplifier than with a guitar… Also notable that the bass-instruments shipped with flatwound strings standard. I have noticed that there is a definite trend lately for electric-guitar players to use flatwound strings again; I have been really enjoying the sound of flatwounds on my 60s Fender and Harmony guitars; it’s kinda the secret ingredient to get the sound of 60s records (assuming yr using an old gtr and an old amp as well). The only problem is that they are more expensive. $12 vs $5 for roundwounds. On the other hand, they rarely break, and it’s not necessary to change them as often, as a ‘dulled’ sound is sorta the point.
Previous 1970s Carvin coverage on PS dot com begins here…
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Music at Home 1973
Dave Brubeck, his sons Darius, Chris, and Danny, and friends Mark Morgenstern, Perry Robinson, and Gerry Mulligan make music at home in 1973. Growing up in Northern Fairfield county, Brubeck was one of the local musical-greats – along with Keith Richards, Meatloaf, Andy Powell, and Mary Travers. The picture above is from vol 10, # 3 of “On The Sound” Magazine, which was a Fairfield-County lifestyle magazine published in the early 1970s. Brubeck will be forever regarded as one of the titans of Jazz music. He is now 91 years old and still lives in the house pictured above, AFAIK.
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Better Living Through Auto-Reverse
Well alright… Cheryl from the Madison office is finally coming over to the condo for dinner. I think she said she liked John Denver and Jim Croce…
Gonna make pretty much the ultimate mix… man this is really gonna set the mood…
OK it’s almost 8… let’s get this tape up on the deck. Thanks to TEAC Auto-Reverse technology, the tape will play over and over and over and over again all night, regardless of how long the night ends up being.
What a fox. Oh yeah? Like the music? Yeah I love these guys too… Saw them at the OysterFest a few years ago… oh yeah, glad you dig it…
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I am not making any of this up. This is an actual TEAC print-ad from January 1976. It features single-people in their mid-30s having a romantic evening at the gentleman’s home (condo). The selling proposition of this product is ‘Auto-Reverse,’ AKA, you don’t have to flip the tape over when the side ends. When we were growing up in the cassette-tape era, Auto-Reverse was still a premium-feature of the higher-priced tape players. I actually don’t think I ever had an auto-reverse walkman; they were just too expensive. Flipping the tape was just part of life. Good thing i was too young at the time to have any ladies to entertain. By the time I started dating, the CD was already in-play. ‘Repeat’ is of course a feature of all CD decks.
Anyhow, this advert is a good example of the ‘lifestyle-benefit’ advertising that consumer electronics manufacturers employed in the 70’s. Set a little stage, tell a little story, allow the consumer to insert themselves into the scenario. This was in some contrast to much electronics advertising of the 40s to 60s, much of which was focused on ‘fidelity’ and ‘value.’ By the 70s, 20-20k performance (OK, 30-15k) was a given in most equipment; transistors and PCBs had made this stuff affordable to most working-class folks; so the benefit of one brand over the other needs to be demonstrated in other ways. In this case, the increased romantic-potential of a dinner-date.
Download a five-page scan of the various guitar amps, guitars, effects, and other Rock-combo-flotsam available from Heathkit in 1969:
DOWNLOAD: Heathkit_guitar_amps_1969
Products on offer include: Heathkit Starmaker TA-16 amplifier; AKG and Shure mics and Atlas stands; TA-27 guitar amp; Harmony ‘Silhouette’ H17 electric guitar; Heathkit TA-28 “Fuzz” Booster and TA-58 headphone amp; TA-17 amplifier head and TA-17-1 speaker system; TA-38 bass amplifer (130 lbs!); and a kit version of the famous Vox Jaguar organ.
M. and I were digging through some local pawn shops last week and we spotted the above-depicted ‘Starmaker’ amplifer buried under some radial arm saws. Coincidentally enough, the price they were asking was the same $119 that it would have cost you to buy as a kit in 1969. “…in about 8-10 hours and you’ll have the best value around in a solid-state amp. Order yours now.”
Kit-built electronics were a fascinating and vital part of consumer-culture in America through the 1970s. It’s kind of liberating when you think about it: a product which parses out some (but certainly not all) of the labor from the physical materials of the product; you, the consumer, can then create the finished product from a combination of your capital (money) and your raw labor/time. I am about to do the same thing with a shed; we need someplace to put our lawnmower, and the right balance of capital/labor for my particular circumstances is a shed-kit. I have neither the money to pay someone to build a shed for me nor the free time to build a shed from a blueprint and a pile of uncut lumber; the shed kit seems like the right choice for me. At some point in America, the value of the labor required to complete a piece of consumer-electronics equipment fell below a certain point, thanks to a combination automation (robots) and cheap foreign labor. This made the Heathkit a fairly indefensible option. This affordability of foreign labor (and transportation costs…) can’t last forever though. So I have to wonder: as foreign labor prices continue to rise, will we ever see a return of the kit-option for consumer electronics in America?
Do you ever come across a Vox Jaguar and wonder why it does not work quite right? Well now we know: it could have originated as one of these kits; 91 lbs of cold solder joints and sloppy lead dress. Heathkit makes a bold claim about the capability of the above Jaguar when used in league with their TA-38 bass amp: “Here’s a combination that will produce the most mind-bending, soul-grabbing sound around.” 266 lbs, $499.00.
Thanks to Steve DiCostanzo and WPKN 89.5 FM in Bridgeport CT for inviting me on-air for two hours last night to present a program that I call “The Devil in God’s House: Gospel Music themes in RockNRoll of the Nixon Era.” The show was live last night 6/13 from 10PM til midnight.