The Afterword

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The Afterword #100: The Recordingcast

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In our 100th episode Twang welcomes Skirky, FentonSteve and Mister Pee to the pod to discuss how music is recorded. Partly a history lesson, partly a set of opinions strongly held and fiercely defended, the team can agree (more or less) that it’s never been easier to make and consume music and that this must be a good thing.



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  1. Just a few technical corrections for those of you shaking your heads and tut-tutting about some of the info discussed herein. The first two Beatles albums were indeed recorded on 2 track machines, often overdubbing by ‘bouncing down’ between two machines. And I was wrong about them not using Olympic. They did record a few bits and pieces there, including the backing track for the live All You Need is Love broadcast, but Glyn Johns wasn’t engineering. However Mr J did do some mixing there for his unused Let it Be versions.

    And Twang was bang on about Bohemian Rhapsody being made at Rockfield Studios not at Trident.

  2. Brave topic guys as pretty much covers everything we talk about here. Good chat as ever with, for me, the most intriguing comment being that Simon reckons you can now have 1000 tracks on Logic. The next Feedback File album will be immense !!

    • Actually, each Logic Pro song can have 1000 stereo audio tracks plus 1000 software instrument midi tracks. That’s a mere 1,996 more than The Beatles had for Sgt Pepper.

  3. Always going to be a harder sell than some other Podcast topics I suppose (even as a non-musician, I could personally have taken it a bit more technical, but I’m probably in the minority) but I enjoyed it tremendously. Thanks, people.

  5. I enjoyed the cast, guys!

    The two real engineering innovations on Revolver were Ken Townshend’s invention, automatic double tracking (ADT), and EMI maintenance team’s Automatic Transient Overload Control, which boosted the volume without distortion. The main beneficiary was Paul’s bass that could now sound as beefy and prominent as Duck Dunn’s recorded by Tom Dowd on The Stax label or James Jamerson’s on Motown captured by Mike McLean. There’s another couple of names for the list of pioneering engineers and if you are looking for visionary producers, how about Isaac Hayes and Norman Whitfield?

    I also think Brian Wilson took Spector’s Wall Of Sound to another level. Chuck Bitz was his engineer and he’s clear that Wilson worked differently from Spector. Wilson would often bring the musicians in individually and use more effects, whereas Spector had everyone in the room at once. Wilson would mix down from state-of-the-art eight track to one and apply layer after layer, bouncing each down in turn. He would leave six of the eight tracks for the vocals. Remember, Wilson only really produced mono records but they sound so rich and complex.

    Moving on, I think Brian Eno deserves a nod. What a career that man has had as non-musician! Coming bang up to date, it’s difficult to see past Kanye West. Whatever else you think of him, he is undoubtedly a genius in a recording studio.

    • Few things to query here TL!

      Firstly ADT. Yes a slightly interesting innovation which creates the effect of eg two people singing from one voice or a wobbly effect when overdone. Hardly a game changer, though. I doubt most people would notice it if it weren’t there. But saves hours of tedious overdubbing and tape tracks of course.

      And ATOC, I think you might be misunderstanding. ATOC was simply a device used when cutting the master discs to be used for pressing vinyl. It allowed louder pressings by automatically moving the grooves on the record further apart for louder bits. Again, hardly something that changed the world although it may have made a Beatles track slightly louder on your coffee shop jukebox.

      I doubt if either of this minor innovations sold a single extra record, to be honest.

      On Pet Sounds, the Beach Boys album we discussed, Brian Wilson very much didn’t bring the musicians in one by one, he used Spector’s ‘get as many of them in one room as you can and rehearse and rehearse until you get it banging’ technique, then press record. Then overdub the vocals. Yes, there were a couple of additional overdubs perhaps of instruments but not in the way you suggest. You can see photos of the sessions with everyone crammed in like a mini rock orchestra. And the instrument tracks were on 4 track if memory serves. As for effects, in the technical sense, not really. Reverb and delay, just like Spector. Nothing special or innovative. As I said in the Podcast, I think BW is a genius writer and arranger but not an innovator in a technical sense at all.

      In most musical genres, the innovation tends to come from the musicians on the other side of the glass and from the people creating new instruments and sounds eg Mr Moog and Mr Linn of synth and drums fame.

      • Here’s an interview with Chuck. Seems Wilson did both.

        http://www.albumlinernotes.com/Chuck_Britz.html

        ATOC certainly pleased McCartney, even if the difference was in the pressing. The difference between Rubber Soul bass and Revolver is marked. ADT certainly changed The Beatles’ mindset, especially John. It may well have been tried out on Cilla first but it was for The Beatles from the outset. There are surprisingly few backward tapes and special effects on Revolver (mainly Tomorrow Never Knows and Yellow Submarine. I’m Only Sleeping has a bespoke ‘backward’ guitar part that was actually played backwards then the tape reversed forward), yet there is such a luxurious feel to the textures of the guitars, drums and invited guests, mostly ADT assisted, much like Leslie is all over Abbey Road with a fair bit of Moog added in (both curtesy of Harrison).

        • Not forgetting the engineering: Norman Smith on Rubber Soul and 19-year-old Geoff Emerick on Revolver.

          Revolver features Fender amps, Fairchild compressors, close-mic’ing and damping of Ringo’s kick drum, using a rewired speaker as a bass amp mic.

          • Fairchilds were used from 64 on. First album was possibly even Hard Day’s Night, but certainly on Beatles for Sale. Emerick mostly used only two or three mics on the kit, virtually identical setup to Smith, for most of Revolver, though he did start damping the kick more apparently, yes. You can see the setup in the pics of the session. The speaker as mic technique was only used on a couple of tracks as an experiment. But they start putting the bass on a separate track which is a big change as you can control its level separately etc. Perhaps the most interesting change to the Beatles’ working practices at this time was they started using headphones for the first time. Previously they’d do overdubs playing along to big speakers on the studio floor.

        • Hi TL, in the article you linked to, the engineer specifically describes what I was talking about. He REHEARSED the musicians separately to craft their parts, which is totally normal, but they all PLAYED TOGETHER in one pass for the recording. I do appreciate that this technical stuff is a bit confusing for non-musos or recording folk so apologies for the pedantry!

          He says: “It was interesting, because you would hear him working with each musician, but it didn’t mean a hill of beans until they started playing it together. “

          • I took from that that he both recorded a number of musicians together in the room and individual musicians separately. He certainly went to great lengths to achieve the mesh of texture he had in his head. I bet Chuck would claim Wilson as a great innovator.

  7. Thanks all – a good listen as always. I do disagree about Brian Wilson though – the production work on Good Vibrations in particular and the Smile sessions in general were groundbreaking, in my non-expert opinion. I recently caught one of those BBC 4 docos about recording tape (I think it was possibly referred to in the cast), which was absolutely brilliant in explaining the development of recording onto tape, and used GV as an example.

    • What’s groundbreaking about Good Vibrations? The interesting thing is that it was made from multiple edits, so each section recorded by itself then all glued together at the end. But again, nothing that other artists, especially the Beatles, weren’t doing. Don’t get me wrong, GV is a sensational record, but I don’t see it as groundbreaking in the way that the first records with samplers or drum machines were. It was still essentially lots of musicians in a room. And remember, BW wrote sheet music for them, too. About as traditional a setup as you can get in many ways.

  9. Great podcast. I was lucky enough to work with a soundfield microphone back in the early nineties (before I do what I do now). An amazing bit of kit. I suggested we stick it on a drum kit and I think it sounds great. Here’s one of (not many) songs I got to use it on-

    Song for summer- Moonflowers

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