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中文1. RECORDING TECHNOLOGY- AN INTRODUCTION1
Instruments such as telephone, phonograph and radio were the three sound mechanisms invented during the Electric Revolution that enabled sound to be split from its source and reach people far and wide.
The telephone enabled two parties to talk and listen to each other irrespective of the distance. Phonograph recorded and preserved the sound. Radio enabled sounds to be heard by people far and wide. Brian Eno, an innovative producer and a former member of Roxy Music, gives a very thought-provoking example of the significance of recording when he comments that music as opposed to being an event that is perceived at a given situation disappears after it gets finished (confined by time). However, recording actually makes the listener listen to the music again and again thereby drawing several sounds and interpretations when listened at different times (a spatial experience). He goes on further to remark that the effect of a tape recorder really put the music in a spatial dimension, making it possible to squeeze the music or expand it.
Before we delve into the recording process of The Beatles’ ground-breaking album called “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” which was released in 1967, it would be particularly interesting to note the technology and the techniques that were discovered in the 1950s, how they were made available at their disposal.
The invention of the tape recorder in 1950s had an enormous effect on electronic music. Although a phonograph or a gramophone was used extensively by pioneering electronic musicians, tape recorder made the whole process of recording, editing, superimposing (mixing) and performing far easier and effective. It was the earliest form of the present day computer sequencer.
The tape studios were primarily as a result of the improvements in magnetic tape recording. Musique Concrète, a new art music was started in Paris in1948 by Pierre Schaffer and Pierre Henry. Musique Concrète (concrete sounds) was chosen the name to differentiate it from normal music, Musique Abstraite, music that is created abstractly in the composer’s mind, written down in the form of a score and then played. Music Concrète starts with a raw sound material which is non-electronic in origin, say the sound of a wind, which has been recorded on a tape via a microphone. The identity of the sound that is the wind is transformed by variety of means such as cutting and splicing the tape to form a musical continuity. When a greater variety of texture is required, two or more of these continuities are mixed by playing the tapes at the same time and recording the resultant mixture. Vast range of sounds can be used for Musique Concrète such as sounds of environment, vocal sounds and musical instruments.
Elektronische Musik, a compositional approach by electronic means, was started by a group of composers and scientists at Cologne in 1951. It was an alternative to Musique Concrète. It begins with electronic sound sources, which provides the raw materials for further processing. With sine-wave, pulse and white noise generators as the basic sound material, the composer creates complex spectra through mixing, filtering displacing of sound. These are then recorded on tape. Once on tape, it follows the same procedure as Muique Concrète. The elements may either be cut or spliced and the sounds may be modified. Eminent musicians and scientists such as Herbert Eimert, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Robert Beyer and Werner Meyer-Eppler were involved in Elektronische Musik. This was also the period when experimental and expressionist musicians such as John Cage and Philip Glass were involved in making music using any means available to them (Ciamaga, 1975).
However, eventually, there was a problem of control with the tape recorder machines and studios. In the 1950s, the tape studios had an assortment of oscillators and filters but there were very limited techniques for performing on them. It was a laborious task to create a composition after recording the required sounds, often one note at a time, and editing the resulting tapes until the composition was complete. Thus it was a logical step to make more devices to control the existing ones. The flexibility of the studios as a result was determined by controlling equipments rather than sound producing devices. The voltage controlled synthesisers that came out during the 1960s such as Moog and VCS 3 (Voltage Controlled Synthesiser with three oscillators) in particular changed the recording and music-making process for the better. The future was once again reshaped by technology- this time by voltage controlled analogue synthesisers. Some of these aspects would be explored and even stretched creatively on The Beatles’ ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’.
2. SGT. PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND- A CORNERSTONE IN RECORDING TECHNOLOGY
During the production of ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’, The Beatles took a hand-on approach to recording especially during mono- mixing. While they recorded this album, there were no 8-track recorders available in Britain. They used a 4-track recorder. The recording made extensive use of techniques such as bouncing effect in which a number of tracks were recorded across the four tracks which were later mixed and dubbed onto one track. Magnetic tape enabled them to use instruments such as Mellotron which was an early form of keyboard sampler that enables one to use sounds of different instruments without actually using those instruments (such as horns and violins).
Flanging and Phasing were used for echo effects. The Beatles used wah-wah pedals and fuzzbox and used it with their creative ideas by running them through a speaker. Also Paul McCartney discovered the Direct Input technique in which he record bass by plugging it into the amplifying circuit in the recording console. This gave the bass an all together different presence than what used to heard on most of the recordings prior to this. The bass used to be recorded last by placing the amplifier in the centre of the studio and placing the microphone six feet away from the source.
An Automatic Double Tracking device was invented specially for the Beatles by the EMI engineer Ken Townsend that would revolutionise the recording process. This started being used in nearly all modern recordings. The technique of recording multi-track tape at slightly different tape speeds was also another technique (known as vari-speed) that the Beatles mastered during this period. They also created another innovation such as creating an endless loop of laughter and other random sounds made by the runout groove looping back onto itself. (Martin, 1979)
The stereo mix of ‘She’s Leaving Home’ was mixed at a slower speed than the original recording. ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ is not just slower than the actual recording but features much heavier gating and reverb effects. On ‘Good Morning, Good Morning’, the guitar noise is timed differently and a crowd tape noise comes in later during the intro into the title track- ‘Sgt. Pepper (Reprise)’. There were some songs which were made during the sessions of ‘Sgt. Pepper’ but were not included on the actual album. One of them is John Lennon’s ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ which was originally a combination of two different songs that was mastered and engineered by the producer George Martin. It consisted of tape-reversed hi-hat on the verses, ringing tom-toms, double-time timpani and bongos on the later choruses (MacDonald, 1998).
This album saw the Beatles progressing to an unimaginable level. They changed the face of popular music in 1962 but by the time this album came out they created a landmark in musical history. It was as if The Beatles were stepping out of monochrome or black and white into colour: kaleidoscopic ideas, imagery, clothes, films and music. It was psychedelic in the true sense of the word (Lewisohn, 1992).
