A Short History of the Multi-track Recording Studio (adapted from Wayne Wadham's Sound Advice -- a Musician's Guide to the Recording Studio): In general, there have been four separate stages in the development of music recordings studios, roughly aligned with each decade since the 1950s. Until the late 1940s, music was recorded in two ways, both mono. Many recording sessions were done direct to disc, with one or more lacquer masters cut right in the studio. If the music was for a film soundtrack, it was recorded directly onto a 35mm optical soundtrack negative. Running at 18 inches per second, and with about 55 dB signal to noise ratio (abbreviated S/N, a parameter we'll define later), this method gave better overall sound quality than any disc of the time. Tape recording, developed by the Germans during the Second World War, was used both in radio broadcasts and for the deciphering of intercepted code messages. The poor sound quality obtained on that early equipment, due largely to inferior tape, soon improved with the introduction of commercial recorders and new tapes by Telefunken in Europe and Ampex in the United States. These machines were mono, full track (one 1/4" wide track), running at 15 ips for music-quality performance. Lower speeds were usually reserved for voice recording. It was discovered early that you could overdub by playing back a previously recorded tape through a mixer, blending that with live mics, and sending the composite signal to a second recorder. In the history of record production, this simple step rivaled the invention of the wheel. Obviously, the pre-taped music lost a bit of sound quality and gained a bit of noise. Nevertheless, this technique did allow artists to add layers of new music. Such mono-to-mono copy overdubbing was the standard in pop music production up until 1962. Until that time, pop and rock records were made to sound good on AM radio-in highly compressed mono. Not much attention was paid to true stereo in pop and rock until 1967, when the Beatles brought out Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. While stereo was entering its second decade for classical and jazz recording, these genres were played primarily on FM. Rock was usually confined to AM until the early 1970s. Throughout the 1950s, record companies owned most of the better recording studios, renting un-booked hours to outside users for radio and TV commercial productions. There were very few independent studios of any real quality. For rock, the large, well-designed acoustic space did not matter as much as the engineer's ear for getting excitement into the mix. Of the staff engineers at major labels, certainly Billy Porter of RCA stands out. His work on Elvis Presley's earliest hits is a marvel, both for its fine technical quality and many innovative techniques. In the jazz field, Rudy Van Gelder engineered the Blue Note and Prestige sessions of John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and other artists. The crisp and clean cymbal and horn sounds on these tapes challenge even the compact discs on which they are now being rereleased. In 1955, hit guitarist Les Paul commissioned Ampex Corporation to build a custom recorder, with eight parallel tracks to be inscribed on special I"-wide tape. He and his wife, Mary Ford, had done many tape-to-tape records, layering six or more guitar and vocal parts, but they were displeased with the buildup of noise and distortion, not to mention the limited control inherent in the mixing process. The first Ampex 8-track was delivered the next year, and Les and Mary proceeded to make a string of Top 10 hits on it. He developed almost all the techniques and tricks that later became standard in multi-track sessions--headphone or cue mixing, sel-sync overdubbing, bouncing tracks, pre-laying effects and delays, and special vari-speed operations. The late 1950s brought an acceptance of the 2-track recorder in rock sessions, but mostly as a convenience in producing mono records. Basic tracks could be laid down on one track, some instrumental overdubs (perhaps even horns or strings) on the second track (recorded while these musicians heard a headphone playback of track 1 via the record head, later called sel-sync), then both tracks mixed onto the first track of a second machine along with another live overdub. The vocals might then be added on the remaining track of machine 2 and a mono mix made on to a full-track recorder. This process saves at least one tape generation on the basic tracks, gives better control over the level of each overdub, and does allow a remix of at least the vocals and completed tracks. The resulting 2-track tape makes pretty artificial stereo, as evidenced by hits as late as the Beatles' "Nowhere Man," in which all voices and the guitar solo are on one channel and everything else is on the other. As George Martin has pointed out, however, most records produced this way were not meant for stereo issue. The two tracks merely allowed better control over elements in the final mono mix. Record companies, in the wake of public demand for stereo, simply released anything they could find, no matter how artificial it sounded, and regardless of how much the artists objected. Ampex introduced a stock model of its 1/2" 3-track machine in 1960. It offered sel-sync on all tracks and gained its first acceptance with producers of jingles, mainly because a narrator could be added on the third track, rather than on a subsequent pass on 1/4" requiring another generation loss of the music. The 3- track did enable some of the first quasi-natural stereo pop records, however, since the lead vocals could now be mixed into the center, with the music on left and right channels. On the other hand, some rock engineers really had no idea of how to use the medium. There is even one story of a top engineer who used the third track only for acoustic or electric bass. In the mid-l960s $6,000 was a huge studio budget for a rock album. Just four years later, when 8-track became the pro format for rock, and when independent studios began springing up in every loft or converted office space, rentals rose to an unheard-of $60 per hour. This pushed 1969 album studio budgets up to around $10,000 with mix-downs, an amount that might only be approved for established artists-which still did not include AFM or AFTRA musicians' and singers' payments. A decade later, the average studio bill jumped to well over $30,000, with a few privileged artists spending upwards ol $500,000 per album just in studio costs. Yet in the same period of time- '69 to '79, retail album prices went from 9g6.98 to $8.98 list price, an increase of under 30%. Until around 1968, it was fairly standard practice to do two completely separate mixes of singles and albums-one for radio play in mono, the other for home playback in stereo. This caused sales and promotional problems when the mono and stereo mixes of a particular tune had a different sound or feel. Since the mix can make or break a record, labels wanted only the "hit" mix-mono-to be played on the air. Meanwhile, FM rock stations, then developing their first legs, insisted on playing stereo whenever available. As a stopgap some stations installed primitive delays and reverbs to simulate stereo. Others actually bootlegged stereo tapes of hits out the back door of certain studios-unauthorized midnight mixes made by underpaid engineers. CBS came up with a novel solution: Compatible Mixing. This was really nothing more complex than mixing to stereo tape while monitoring the process with both channels mixed to a mono signal. The finished mixes maintained their characteristic sound or punch whether played in mono or stereo. Often, simultaneous full-track and stereo machines ran to give a first-generation mono and stereo product. The process was discontinued in the early 1970s, when the major labels stopped pressing mono albums and singles. By 1970, 16-track was gaining acceptance for rock production in the United States, though even the Beatles continued to use 8-track through most of Abbey Road and Let It Be in that same year. The Ampex MM-1000 16-track package cost almost $35,000 and required a much more elaborate console than was previously available. Split designs became the standard, the main bank of faders used for mic/line inputs feeding the recorder, the monitor section off to the right used to provide cue mixes and other sub-mixes for reverb chambers, and so on. Although Ampex and Scully announced 24-track models to come, there was little rush to buy them because of the noise build-up inherent with so many separate recorded signals. The real demand for 24 tracks came from clients-artists and producers who wanted the control and versatility, even at the expense of more noise and cost. The Dolby A system provided just enough noise reduction to bring 16 tracks of tape noise back down to the noise level of a good 2-track machine, but the first systems were expensive-almost $2,000 a track! Not many studios could afford it, and not many artists wanted to pay the extra in rentals. By 1370 top studios were charging more than $100 per hour. Aside from refinements made in existing devices--quieter and more precise parametric equalizers, smoother compressors and better plate reverbs-few new tricks except mechanical flanging were added to the engineer's bag.