The next few weeks at Preservation Sound: we bring you: in no particular order: some of the state-of-the-art in studio recording equipment of the early 1960s. A period that I like to refer to as the ‘pre-rock-era.’ As-in, Rock And Roll existed, but Rock? That was at least one Ed Sullivan show/protest song/freedom march/long haircut/draft card/Godard film away. Also of note: the period 1960-1963 was also the end-of-the-line of the first Golden Age of vacuum tube audio development. Although new valves and valve-operated products were still being introduced, it was only a short while before Solid State became the defacto state-of-the-art.
Enjoy the material, and as always… if any of y’all are using this kit in the studio these days, drop us a line and let us know…
Includes advertisements for Yamaha MT2X, DX100, and RX17 drum machine; Akai MG614 four-track machine, Tascam Porta2 4-track, Fostex 160, the Boss Micro-Rack series (RDD-20 delay, RPS-10 pitch shifter, RCL-10 compressor, RRV-10 reverb, plus a ton more), and KORG’s multieffects.
*************
*******
***
First-things-first: I have no idea if the ‘John Peel’ to whom this book is credited is theJohn Peel, he of legendary status as a DJ and taste-maker for an entire generation of rock and pop music. There is nothing whatsoever in this 98pp paperback volume (found in a Manchester OXFAM back in the early 00’s) that offers any indication pro or con. A third option would seem to be the ghostwriter scenario. Anyhow. “Making 4-Track Music” (h.f. “M4TM”) is an A5-sized paperback that attempts to introduce readers to the equipment and processes of using 4-track recorders.
The 4-track recorder, for those unfamiliar, is a category of product first introduced by the TASCAM corporation in 1979 with their model 144.
The 1979 TASCAM 144. Bruce Springsteen recorded his greatest album on this small plastic machine, believe-it-or-not. (Image source)
TASCAM already dominated the home-recording market with their 3440 1/4″ open reel tape recorder and the associated mixer-units that were marketed alongside it. These systems had a rather high cost of entry, though: they cost much more than a good used car. The 144 brought the basic concept of multi-track audio recording and mixing to a far lower price-point by using consumer cassette tape rather than 1/4″ open reel tape as the recording media, and by combining the audio-recording device and the audio-mixing apparatus into one single item. This made for a much more affordable system and it also made for easier use: no wires to hook up, no redundant or unnecessary features. Just the basic technology needed to record a performance and then add 3 additional performances in perfect synchronization while retaining the ability to control relative volumes and treatments of each track. With a creative user, the 4-track machine is capable of much more, but this is the basic concept.
“M4TM” covers all of this, and more; there is an explanation of the various recording and mixing features that the consumer would encounter in the marketplace, plus good treatment of the various types of additional processing equipment that a 4-track owner might like: digital time-based effects (delay, etc), compressors, gates, EQs., etc.
The aesthetics/art of making recordings is not really considered at all; there is a lot of talk about money, costs, (e.g., KORG’s above-depicted rainmaking) and the improved ‘recording quality’ that such expenditures can deliver but no mention of improving the presentation of songs and sonic ideas via any of this technology. Here’s a typical passage:
************
As someone who’s work is largely based on the commercial recording studio that I own and operate, I find it rather… alarming/offensive that the prime benefit of making a recording in a pro studio is the sound-quality, to extent that this benefit could be completely undone by several generations of tape-duplication. Jesus. I like to hope that I give my clients something more than a good signal-noise ratio and even frequency response. The passage above kind of makes it seem like it’s the EQUIPMENT in a studio that is doing the work, rather than the engineer… is this how most musicians feel about studios? Is this how I used to feel about studios, when I was 4-tracking at home at age 19?
Furthermore, M4TM does not even entertain the aesthetic or artistic possibilities of all of this ‘4-track’ equipment. Rather, the emphasis is very much on ‘making-a-demo’ en route to possibly getting a ‘record deal,’ and all that this will entail (presumably the “Riches and Fame” for which you will have KORG to thank). The idea of possibly creating a compelling piece of artwork with this equipment is simply absent.
I wonder when this changed. By the time I started recording heavily on a four 4-track machine, a mere 8 years later (1995), musicians like Bill Callahan (aka SMOG) and Jeff Mangum (aka Neutral Milk Hotel) were already getting attention specifically as masters of 4-track recording. These guys did not appear too interested in making a ‘real record’ in a ‘pro studio.’ The 4-track medium, with its attendant tape hiss, awkward usage once you went past four tracks, and total absence of any sort of editing ability, was a huge part of the artwork that they created. Artwork that has truly endured.
I went to see Jeff Mangum perform last week here in CT. He did a solo set at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven. Jeff Mangum has not released a major album of his own in 13 years. The Shubert was nearly sold-out to it’s 1591 capacity.
Have a listen (above) to “Naomi” from Neutral Milk Hotel’s 1996 4-track masterpiece “On Avery Island.” Would these songs have been rendered any more compelling had they been tracked and mixed in a studio? I think we all know the answer to that… Ultimately, though, what Mangum’s solo-acoustic-gtr-and-voice performance at the Shubert last week demonstrated to me was more the fact that it probably honestly didn’t matter how he had made those seminal recordings: the songs themselves are so good and his voice and affect are so well-wrought that their properties can impress regardless of the presentation.
Perhaps I am reading into this all too much…perhaps my ideas and taste are a bit ‘off’ and therefore I have ‘niche’ values. Mangum seems, to me, to be a very straightforward singer/songwriter.. but perhaps my appreciation for artists like Jeff Mangum simply indicates that I have ‘weird’ taste, that I am out-of-step with ‘mainstream’ values… Goggle seems to think so. Here’s what you will see if you play a Neutral Milk Hotel song on Youtube:
Is your significant-other cheating on you? Maybe you need to lose those glasses: improve yr appeal? Fuck it, man, you’re a GEEK. Face it. Geek geek geek. Date another geek.
I am so confused.
1987/2012: Maybe our John Peel simply wrote “M4TM” in a lost era, simple as that… an era when there still was a vigorous economic basis for the music-recording-industry and therefore the idea of recording music as INDUSTRY rather than EXPLOIT was still the dominant theme. It’s also interesting to consider that around the time of the first Neutral Milk Hotel album we also saw the introduction of Tape Op magazine, the first (that I am aware of…) widely-distributed publication that embraced the ethos of home-recording as a serious art form. And all of this happened just-in-time for the introduction of the first affordable DAWs (e.g., Pro Tools LE), which completely changed both the technique and the aesthetics of audio recording forever. You still need to be able to write a good song though. That much hasn’t changed.
Products covered, with text, specs, and photos, include: University Medallion XII speaker system; Classic Mark II and Classic Dual-12 speaker systems; Companion II, S-80, Companionette, and Mini-Flex, and Mini bookshelf speaker systems; the full range of two-and-three-way coaxial University components including 315, 312, 6201, 200, 308, 200, UC-153, UC-152, UC-123, UC-122, UC0121, and UC-82; and University woofers, midranges, , tweeters, and crossover networks including C-15HC, C-12HC, C-8HC, C-15W, C-8W, HF-206, UXT-5, 4401, C-8M, Sphericon, H-600, Cobreflex, T-30, T-50, N-1 High Pass Filter, N-3 acoustic baton, N-2A and N-2B crossovers, plus more.
Above, the flagship Medallion XII system in a variety of “select-a-style” grilles. There is a pair of Medallion XII (in French Provincial trim, naturally) on eBay right now for $200. University Sound was founded in 1936, and became part of the LTV_Ling_Altec family of brands sometime before 1963, and eventually became absorbed into the Telex corporation.
Above, the University Classic Dual-12 system. These things look serious. I currently own a University single-12 system; it is a corner unit from the Mono era; its has very nice cabinetwork and it sounds surprisingly good for a full-range 12″ system.
This catalog is obsessively dedicated to selling speakers to a male/female couple. Nearly every human image consists of a sample couple in the throes of consideration. Which system to buy for our home? So much to learn. Let University help you. Honestly I can’t read the emotions in these faces. Perhaps early-1960’s people had a different feeling-set than we experience in the (post-Vietnam/LSD/Civil Rights) era. Confused by these photos, anyhow. This series seems to suggest: 1) ‘quiz-show-don’t-know-the-answer’; 2) ‘I’m not really paying attention to you’; 3) (undeserved?) smugness; 4) ‘we’re on a boat, and you’ve been naughty.’
What purpose can programmed sound serve in our environment? Communication of information. Entertainment. Marking boundaries of different spaces. All of this happens in the environment of an airport. We need to know if there has been a gate-change for our flight. We enjoy some sort of distraction or amusement while we wait. We expect one sort of sound in the airport bar, and another at the gate. OK. So… inform, entertain, delineate. But how about… changing the mental state of an unsuspecting listener by lulling them into an acceptance of their relative insignificance in the universe in order to help assuage their fears of possible imminent death?
Here’s how Brian Eno, composer of ‘Music for airports,’ widely considered to be the first ‘ambient music’ album, explains his project:
“… Whenever you go into an airport or an airplane, they always play this very happy music, which is sort of saying: ‘You’re not going to die, there’s not going to be an accident, don’t worry!’ And, I thought, that was really the wrong way around, I thought that it would be much better to have music that said: ‘Well, if you die, it doesn’t really matter.’ You know. So I wanted to create a different feeling, that you were sort of suspended in the Universe and your life or death wasn’t so important. …” (source)
Talk about turning the problem on-its-head. I should say at this point that I am an unabashed huge fan of Brian Eno; IMO, there is no one person in the history of recorded sound that has been as able to imagine and exercise new potentials for audio. Anyhow… if you feel that his statements in the interview above seem somewhat grandiose/flakey/pie-in-the-(or falling from the)-sky-ish, I offer this personal anecdote. I recently played the opening of ‘music for airports’ for my students in my Soundtrack class (‘The Soundtrack’ is a course I’ve been teaching at the University which gives visual arts and communications students an understanding of the creative potentials of audio in their work). We were discussing the programming of audio in public spaces – shops, restaurants, etc. I played 5:00 of “Music for Airports” and asked what they music made them think of. Several immediately responded, ‘death.’ OK, I replied… how do you feel about this death?’ “Okay” was the reply. Well done Eno.
It’s kind of hard to believe that there were so many airports in the US in the late 1960s that Altec published these 6pp and 8pp catalogs. While there are no claims in these publications that these Altec systems might be used to effectively assuage customers’ fear of death, they do offer the following:
“Lack of reliability (in an airport sound system) can cause not only inconvenience but actual danger and panic in some cases. This is why Altec Lansing, pioneer in integrated sound systems, has stressed aerospace-level reliability in every… component.”
Altec stresses here that lack of reliability, such as it might result in the mis-cue of important verbal flight information, can potentially cause danger and panic. Eno took this one step further by understanding that the music-programming of the environment can also have a dramatic effect on the mental state of the customers; and he systematically set out to design sound-pieces that maximize the potential of the sound-system to comfort those customers.
Products discussed include the Altec 650, 687, and 695 microphones; various compressors and power amps; and audio-signal distribution equipment. ‘Case studies’ which catalog various successful Altec airport sound-systems already in use are provided as well.
Have you ever entered a long-abandoned space; a time capsule?
Not like a cave or a forest or a wood; those are natural places which exist independent of any time-keeping, in a vast seamless stretch.
I am referring instead to places touched and crafted by humanity, once; and then left, sealed up, like a pharaoh’s tomb. How do you think Howard Carter felt when he first entered King Tut’s tomb? What do we feel when we enter these ancient spaces?
They are filled with unfamiliar objects, layers of dust (matter once organized and differentiated, now becoming undifferentiated), and what else? Ghosts? What is a ‘ghost’ if not the /voice/ of a departed individual that still /speaks/ to us through the discourse established by their abandoned objects/spaces?
Our bodies can move freely through the three dimensions of space, unless shackled by disease or coercive force; but most people intuitively feel that we cannot move freely through time. This restriction on controlled movement through time is tolerated, at best, and suffered deeply at worst. Most feel that we move forward through time, at a rate that does seem to vary with activity and age; but backward through time? Can we access the past? Do we ever feel that we are using the force of a prior moment?
The future holds possibilities, certainly; but the past does as well. Just as we can chose our current actions from a certain set of possible actions, and therefore chose our futures to a degree, we can also chose our pasts. We can chose which elements of the past we incorporate into our lives. There is an essential difference, for instance, between filling your air/space/life with the music of Led Zeppelin and the Beatles vs filling your life with the music of Jim Ford and Pearls Before Swine. While Led Zeppelin and the Beatles are certainly two of the finest musical groups to ever make a record, the great success that they experienced ensures that they will become part of the fabric of all subsequent musical culture. They are already baked-in, as it were, to 99% of rock music that you might experience on any radio station or television show today. This does not make them bad: but it does make them inevitable. Experiencing the legacy of Zeppelin and the Beatles is not a choice; it is mandatory. On the other hand, when we chose to heavily involve ourselves with forgotten, cast-off bits of history, we can actively re-shape our own contemporary reality. Obscurity, as a preference, is not simply motivated by a supposed hierarchy of accessibility or a badge of time-spent-in-the-trenches; when we engage ourselves with the entombed, the brilliant-but-dead-end bits of history, aren’t we really crafting a unique present moment for ourselves?
The films of Quentin Tarantino are often described as post-modern because he mixes cultural signifiers of many different eras and subcultures in a non-heirachical way in order to arrive at a new and unique meaning. Consider Samuel Jackson’s character in the clip above: The suit of a jazz musician from the 50s; jheri curl hairdo from the 80s; the highly charged speech patterns of the 60s civil rights movement; driving the 1970s sedan. What year is it again? Tarantino is making films for a wide audience, so none of these are particularly obscure references in and of themselves; he wants to entertain you, not send you to Google after the movie to look up what the hell was going on. But the overall affect is still achieved through a kind of time-play. This demonstrates that yes the past, as well as the future, holds immense expressive possibilities.
When we’re working in the studio, and we record a vocalist with an ancient microphone, what exactly are we doing? What effect are we creating? It’s not likely that we’re trying to trick anyone into thinking that this pop song was recorded in 1932. We’re generally not even trying to reference the historical period 1932 via the recording. But we do have the potential to build a new space that exists along a different axis entirely. Not a past-plus-present but a denial or refutation of single-vector linear time. I don’t think this actually happens very often; we can use all sorts of audio equipment from the entire 100-year history of recording technology and still easily end up with ‘just a pop song,’ be it a genius one or a terrible one. But there is real possibility in this.
If you are reading this website right now, you are probably involved in the recording of music in some way. You probably own or admire antique or ‘vintage’ recording equipment, and use it in your work. Why do you do it? What is the benefit for you? What expressive power does it have? Are you taking full advantage of those possibilities?
Products covered, with vague text, no specs (or prices), and moody photography/impressionistic illustration, include: 1975 Martin D-18, D-28, D-35, etc; Gibson Les Paul bass, Triumph, Signature, ES-335TD-SV, ES-345TD, among others; Gibson J-200, Blue Ridge 12, and J-55; Dobro 60D, 33, 90, and 35 resonator guitars; Guild F-50, F-40, D-50, F-212XL, among others; Fender Telecaster, Telecaster Deluxe, Thinline, Precision, Jazz, and Telecaster Basses; the Bradley line of directly-imported MIJ ‘Lawsuit’ guitars, including the Doubleneck, FV-60, ES-775, TE350, JB60-W, ST50-N, LP65-N, and LP54; Amplifiers and PA from Acoustic, Ampeg, DB Sound (look similar to Heil, which is also represented), Gollehon PA from Grand Rapids, MI, including their 8218/M, 8218/A, MR-90 Horn, 8220/M and /A models; AKG, Shure, and Maruni Mics; ARP and Moog synthesizers; and a pile of guitar effects pedals that no one can afford anymore.
ME was the catalog division of the family-owned Veneman instrument retail-store business. Veneman was purchased by Guitar Center in 2004. Check out these sepia-tinted photos for a second. Veneman could easily have opted to re-print the images that manufacturers supply through their distributors, but they really went the extra mile; the mood of these images, combined with the glaring lack of any sort of pricing or specifications, seems impossible today as a sales strategy for guitars: ME was selling you an attitude and a vibe first; the particular instruments were secondary. Consider another interesting fact about the images in the catalog: apart from the High Priestess on the cover, there are no almost no photographic image of people in the catalog. Instead we get some beautiful line-illustration work. While this could have been a talent compensation/rights issue, I feel like it’s more of a deliberate move that allows the musician/customer to more easily insert themselves into these instrument-scenarios. I mean, who wants to buy a Les Paul that you see slung around the neck of some bro in a (insert yr least favorite sartorial signifier) shirt?
A possible overall explanation? It’s the Whole Earth Catalog Effect. If yr not familiar with the Whole Earth Catalog (h.f. WEC), and you have any interest whatsoever in American culture of the 1970s, get a copy of an early edition and check it out. It is one of the most seminal documents of the era, as well as being an early precursor of the peer-to-peer information exchange style that we now experience in the form of….yup… the internet. There were about a billion (or googleplex…) copies printed and you can find if for a few bucks at most community book sales or used book shops. Anyhow, WEC was such a powerful and ubiquitous presence among the more liberal and artistic elements of American Society in the 70s that we start to see its editorial and visual style reflected in actual catalogs of the era that were directed at a similar demographic. For another example of this phenomenon, check this…
**************
*******
***
The only really interesting bit as far as the equipment offered is the BRADLEY line of guitars. Bradley was apparently the house-brand of directly-imported Japanese-made guitars which ME exclusively sold.
The text above is taken from page 2 of this royal-purple-colored document. The logical inference would be “As You Are To God, Your PA System Can Be To You! (with ALTEC)”
Been thinking about the voice/sound of God lately. Our recent purchase of a massive Hammond Organ/Leslie speaker system at Gold Coast Recorders has led me to consider the features/tones/visual considerations that Hammond’s designers implemented when they designed these incredibly complex electro-acoustical devices. The large Hammond Organs of the 1950s were designed (and commercially successfully, I might add) to replace the pipe organs which had functioned as a sonic {analog/representation/index/or-what-have-you} for religious expression in the Christian church for hundreds of years. Notice that I say sonic representation, as opposed to musical representation. We experience the Hammond Organ/Leslie system as being impressive and one-could-say ‘godlike’ in it’s sonic attributes, even aside from any particular piece of music that’s performed on it. The unusually deep, pure bass tones of the footpedals; the cavernous Hammond spring reverb system; the swells of the footpedal; the visceral emotional response that the Leslie speaker creates by way of it’s manipulation of the Doppler effect.
Sound systems in churches face certain special design requirements; this 1966 brochure from Altec addresses some of these concerns. Low distortion, extremely high speech intelligibility, uniform coverage, and minimal visual presence; and all of this must be accomplished at a moderate overall acoustical volume. Combine these sonic requirements with the fact that the sound system will often be operated by church members, ie., volunteers, ie., not-professional engineers, and you will find that operational simplicity is also necessary.
Given the large number of old Altec mixers on eBay with a stated provenance of ‘from an old church,’ I feel like Altec was probably pretty successful in their church-marketing initiatives of the 1960s. From what I can gather, Peavey seems to be a leader in church audio today. It’s interesting to examine the various products in their Sanctuary Series and note the differences between these and their standard nightclub PA line.
To my readers out there: do any of you operate sound systems in churches? Are there any special techniques in mic’ing, mixing, or processing of audio in the church environment? Does anyone attend a church that is still using old green Altec PA kit of the 60’s?
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.
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.
As I noted earlier in this series, these documents are fascinating because they reveal a culture beginning to grasp the potential of affordable, widely accessible audio-recording. Each issue of ‘Magnecord, INC’ describes what were essentially new-ideas as far as recording and playing-back sound in various artistic and commercial/industrial applications. Consider the example above: the New Haven fire dep’t circ 1951. Notice that there is no mention in this piece about enhancing public health and/or safety: here, the Magenecorder is being used to “..protect() the city and the fire department against complaints.” While I am not saying that this was the birth of ‘PYA,’ aka, ‘Protect Your Ass,’ it’s certainly an example of an early milestone. “This call is being recorded for quality and training purposes.” Here’s where it began…
So many tape recorders. So much tape. So much to record.
I do not trust you, microphone. Yet. 
