Hearing stories of how stingy EMI was, (even to The Fabs, who were their number one money-making signed act); how they used to have to break the lock on the fridge in order to get milk for their tea, and how Ringo ended up bringing his own toilet paper from home because the cheap stuff that EMI used was like sandpaper, I doubt that it's a fridge. LOL

Maybe a speaker cabinet for monitoring cue/playback.. ? They did quite a bit of live tracking without using headphones.... At first I thought perhaps a Leslie cabinet, but it looks to be too tall for that, and I'm not sure that EMI even had one that early on...

i didn't really think it was a fridge. lol! after inspecting the image more i would venture a guess that it's a powered speaker most likely used for talk back/playback of takes. you can see Lennon's looking up to the control room as if to be asking, "Well ... what do you think?"

If I'm not mistaken, that's an Abbey Road playback monitor. I remember having to wheel one of them into position on the single occasion that I was an assistant engineer at a session in Studio 2.

Boswell, post: 434521, member: 29034 wrote: If I'm not mistaken, that's an Abbey Road playback monitor. I remember having to wheel one of them into position on the single occasion that I was an assistant engineer at a session in Studio 2.

Wait.... WHAT?

You were an AE once at Abbey Road?

How come we didn't know about this???

You can't hold that kind of stuff back, Bos. :)

Yes, that was in 1968, or thereabouts. I have mentioned it here [[url=http://[/URL]="http://recording.or…"]before[/]="http://recording.or…"]before[/], but forum members only picked up on the Union rules aspect on that occasion.

I went back and read your post... but it doesn't say who you were recording, or the engineer, or producer ... c'mon, give us the skinny... details, Bos! ... we crave DETAILS. lol

Well, it was in the days before I kept detailed notes of all that sort of thing. The singers were some friends of mine. The engineer was someone whom I had not heard of beforehand and never knowingly heard of again aftwards, so I simply don't remember the name. The producer ran the session, and I think I remember him being Richard Hill, but I could be wrong about that.

I learnt a lot from those sessions.

I wonder if it's possible for them to look through their records from 1968, and verify some of the people who are on the session etc. really really cool story though boz

The large white refrigerator was in fact a playback monitor. Dubbed "The White Elephant" or RLS10 . They were used until 1966 when headphones came into being. They were used in tracking and overdubbing. They were self powered and mono.

So they recorded while those were playing back like stage monitors, or where they just for checking takes?

As Dave mentioned, in the days before headphones were eventually implemented, studios used speakers as the monitor method for playback during actual tracking and overdubs. ( Abbey Road certainly wasn't the only studio to do this).

There's something to be said for that method... there is a school of thought, ( shared to a large extent by our very own Chris B. ( audiokid ), the belief that headphone bleed is "inferior" to speaker bleed, because with a speaker, at least it's playing the full range, resulting in a more cohesive and controllable bleed, in that it "fits in" better with the tracks being recorded. Also, it's stagnant; a speaker isn't moving around like a performer often will while singing into a microphone, (as the performer moves, so do the headphones that they are wearing), so that if there is some bleed picked up from the speaker, it's consistent in both frequency and level, and not the ever-changing, tinny, phasey, swirly sound that HP's can so often present when moving around in close proximity to a mic.

If the mics are placed correctly and with care, and the playback speaker is located as close to the at the null point of the mic as possible, the bleed is often of an acceptable level and sound quality.

side note: When I was 18, I had surgery on both ears to remove cartilage that was growing over my ear drums - I can hear fine, I'm still good up to about 17k or so - but all these years later, if there is physical pressure on my ears, like seeping on one side for too long, or wearing headphones for an extended period of time, it actually becomes physically painful for me, so I have used my studio monitors - at low levels and with the mic placed so that the null faces the speakers - as a playback cue method while recording OD's more than just a few times.

Depending on where the speaker is located, and the acoustics of the room in which it resides, the potential downsides to this method are:
1.) that you can end up with a delay, depending on where the speaker is located in proximity to the mic, and
2.) you are risking picking up the reflected sound of the speaker from the room where the speaker is located.

The speaker method seems foreign and strange to those who don't know any different, and who are maybe too young to know about this method. We've all become accustomed to using headphones over the years, because that's the most popular method...and with newer HP models that have a higher degree of isolation, it's become less of an issue than it used to be.

But in the days before HP's, the speaker method worked ... and it worked surprisingly well (obviously).

FWIW :)

A HUGE plus to this was using mics with a high quality pattern. If the mic's pattern is very defined then having something playing in the null will have very little effect on the capture going on . At Abbey Road, the use of figure- of- eight mics , specifically Neumanns made this a simple task as well as having excellent level control on the monitor AND recording in mono with the monitor tracks in mono. There are examples of the 'bleed' on several Beatles tracks. Most of them attributed to the stereo mixes that were created later. "Run For Your Life" the stereo version has an obvious bleed from John's vocal early in the song....."Yesterday" has a very obvious leakage. The overdub vocal part at " I said something wrong" is both the overdub and the playback from the original recording of Paul's voice with the guitar part.

One other thing the White Elephant speakers were famous for in the Beatles history was when Ken Townsend decided to use them as a transducer to increase the bass on Pauls bass. These were then reverse wired and used as a mic on the tracks for "Paperback Writer" and "Rain". This is a method I personally have use and still do from time to time on several different types of instruments, specifically kik drum....ala Sub-Kik...I also will use it on a secondary snare track as a layer to the original snare. In this case you run the snare track out to an amp....reamping it.....and from the amp you lay its speaker down flat facing up. A Fender Bassman is perfect for this.....then you place a snare on top of the speaker....I like to loosen the snares a bit for this....and then you close mic the center of the snare head and record this sound being triggered by the original snare hit. Mix to taste.

Its so much easier with the Slate Trigger these days

DonnyThompson, post: 434723, member: 46114 wrote: ide note: When I was 18, I had surgery on both ears to remove cartilage that was growing over my ear drums - I can hear fine, I'm still good up to about 17k or so - but all these years later, if there is physical pressure on my ears, like seeping on one side for too long, or wearing headphones for an extended period of time, it actually becomes physically painful for me, so I have used my studio monitors - at low levels and with the mic placed so that the null faces the speakers - as a playback cue method while recording OD's more than just a few times

Even with over the ear cans like the Akg 240's for instance?

Davedog, post: 434735, member: 4495 wrote: A HUGE plus to this was using mics with a high quality pattern. If the mic's pattern is very defined then having something playing in the null will have very little effect on the capture going on . At Abbey Road, the use of figure- of- eight mics , specifically Neumanns made this a simple task as well as having excellent level control on the monitor AND recording in mono with the monitor tracks in mono. There are examples of the 'bleed' on several Beatles tracks. Most of them attributed to the stereo mixes that were created later. "Run For Your Life" the stereo version has an obvious bleed from John's vocal early in the song....."Yesterday" has a very obvious leakage. The overdub vocal part at " I said something wrong" is both the overdub and the playback from the original recording of Paul's voice with the guitar part.

One other thing the White Elephant speakers were famous for in the Beatles history was when Ken Townsend decided to use them as a transducer to increase the bass on Pauls bass. These were then reverse wired and used as a mic on the tracks for "Paperback Writer" and "Rain". This is a method I personally have use and still do from time to time on several different types of instruments, specifically kik drum....ala Sub-Kik...I also will use it on a secondary snare track as a layer to the original snare. In this case you run the snare track out to an amp....reamping it.....and from the amp you lay its speaker down flat facing up. A Fender Bassman is perfect for this.....then you place a snare on top of the speaker....I like to loosen the snares a bit for this....and then you close mic the center of the snare head and record this sound being triggered by the original snare hit. Mix to taste.

Its so much easier with the Slate Trigger these days

The sennheisser 441 comes to mind, it's got the tightest pickup pattern I've ever used. Don't think it was around back then.

What neumannn were figure 8's? I now they used slot of 47's and later on 67's back then. Jw.

Hahaha, the speaker on the snare method, never actually did it, but was a recipe in my first audio book purchased 'using your portable studio'. A quick blast into my past. Lmao Dave.

Neumann U47's are cardioid and omni directional patterns....U48's are cardioid and figure-of-eight or bi-directional. EMI had several of Abbey Road's original set of U47's sent back to Neumann and had the firure-of-eight pattern added to them. Some photos of the Beatles singing into the front and back of a long body Neumann prompted people to think that they were using the omni pattern when in fact these are the U47's that were altered. So there are long body U47's with bi-directional patterns out there somewhere. Maybe if you own a country you might be able to buy one.....

Davedog, post: 434735, member: 4495 wrote: These were then reverse wired and used as a mic on the tracks for "Paperback Writer" and "Rain".

Those two songs had an amazing low end; rich, full, yet still nicely defined - although there's probably something to be said for Macca's playing style contributing a little to that, too.

Those two tracks still sound great to me. Besides the fact that they're great songs, they sound great to me, too. Paperback Writer is one of those songs that I don't think I'll ever get tired of hearing.

kmetal, post: 434750, member: 37533 wrote: Even with over the ear cans like the Akg 240's for instance?

Yup, even with the loose fitting K240's, pal.

Any pressure on my outer ears, for an extended period of time, becomes very painful for me... I'm not talking about a frequency sort of pain, Kyle ... but a physical pain on the outer shell of my ears.
There have been some nights where I've been awakened by the pain; if I happen to sleep on one side and my ear is pressed against the pillow for too long.

In the last year or so, I've been recording more using my nearfields for the cue mix instead of cans; by keeping the PB volume low and putting either a 414 or U89 with their null points centered at the back towards the speakers.
I do get some bleed, but it's nothing that presents a huge problem in the mixes, at least it hasn't been a problem yet.

I don't really use gates anymore for controlling that sort of thing ... I prefer to manually edit out the extraneous noise in between vocal lines.

Samp's editing is sweet, and with the OBE, there's very little I can't do.

On that note, I can't really even tell you the last time that I used an actual noise gate plug... ( or a de-esser plug, either, but that's a different topic. ;) )

That's unfortunate to hear D. More about the sleep than the cans. I've never liked tracking with headphones anyway, and since guitar is my main drag monitoring w near fields has been the way I do it.

It's great that technology allows us to compensate for things like that.

I didn't use a de esser until about 5 years ago and I almost never use gates (except for noise my guitar amps). I thought I was the only one. Lol. Vocals are all about getting it right to tape/disk if you ask me. Even if you punch in every word. I still don't comp vocals. Hardly ever. Maybe a peice or two, or for doubling effect. But when the vocalist comes into the control room, it should be the final track, or they ain't done yet. Just imo. That's how I've always done it.

Ps- I've rarely spent more than an hour on a vocal often including double/backups. I think they stay in the moment that way, rather than performing, comping, then filling in the missing peices. Besides if it takes more than that long it's probably best to move on and revisit the song later.

I also rarely comp a vocal track. But there is something to be said for the ease of doing so in this day and age. If your signal chain remains intact throughout a session then its rare to get something that physically doesn't sound correct. However...on the last record I did, we tracked the vocalist on one set of gear and I was pretty pleased with it. Then just for fun I opened up another chain completely different from the original. The vocalist was good enogh that we got an almost identical take with the different mic and pre that they sat next to each other so well in the mix it made the vocals really stand out.

kmetal, post: 434827, member: 37533 wrote: Vocals are all about getting it right to tape/disk if you ask me. Even if you punch in every word.

Davedog, post: 434829, member: 4495 wrote: But there is something to be said for the ease of doing so in this day and age.

The downside to being able to do this, though, is that we can very often lose the emotion of a performance, as well as the fluidity that happens when a vocalist is singing a track in its entirety.
Sometimes, we have to determine which is more important - having a pitch-perfect - but sterile - track, or having a track that occasionally drifts away from perfect pitch and phrasing, but which has a passion, an emotion.

Generally, I'll have the vocalist sing a track all the way through, to capture the emotion and the expressiveness of the performance, and then I'll go back and punch in certain corrections as (and if )needed.
Doing it this way also opens the door to those moments of human frailty, those little "faults" that can sometimes turn out to be the "gold" in a track. It's the human element, the "not so perfect" moments; it might be a break in a voice caused by strain, or even an emotional response to singing a certain line, it could be a note, or phrasing, that is totally unplanned and that the vocalist sings by accident, but that turns out to be really cool.

On Terry's album, we were recording a vocal track for I Never Cry, and there's a line, "sometimes I drink more than I need...", and at the end of the word "need", if you listen closely, you can hear a little "hitch" in his voice, that was caused by a momentary reaction to the line - because for him, it was very personal, as he is a recovering alcoholic. Whatever it was about that line that triggered some kind of emotional response in him, it caused his breathing to hitch as he was struggling to hold back tears.

I left that in, we didn't "fix" it, because it's a perfect example of how emotion can affect a performance. It makes it more human, and that moment of vulnerability turned out to be one of those little "gems".

So, while punch-ins can result in those "pitch/phrase perfect" tracks, you also close the door to the possibility of emotion, and the spontaneity of the moment... the human element gets lost.

IMHO of course.

Most modern commercial music sounds sterile to me, largely do to the emphasis on technical perfection that blinds people to the emotional content. Music making is a social activity. The further you move from that the less appealing it is to me. Overly perfect vocals are just one example. Looped drums, or even just a click track, tend to take the life out of a song. Obviously for some genres that's just how it's done, but imagine what beat quantization and pitch correction, or even just a lot of punching/comping, would have done to Janis Joplin's "Me and Bobby McGee".

I usually do about 3-5 full takes and fix the clams.

I do disagree to an extent that you loose emotion with punch ins. Technical perfection always takes the back seat. I find most of the time I actually am coaching the person to find some more emotion on the punch ins, or better phrasing. Sometimes there's very important words or phrases that aren't expressed properly in the full take, for various reasons. Maybe they are out of breath, maybe they focused on something else, maybe they didn't know how important it was. There's also the opportunity to explore different parts, cuz the meat of the song is done. I agree very much that it is essential to get some full takes first.

That really comes down to putting your producer hat on, and knowing what the song takes, and what the singer is capable of.

Imo vocals/harmonies are one of the places where experimentation in the studio can lend quite a benefit. As opposed to the rythym guitarist trying out new riffs, or the drummer trying out different 'feels'.

bouldersound, post: 434850, member: 38959 wrote: Most modern commercial music sounds sterile to me, largely do to the emphasis on technical perfection that blinds people to the emotional content. Music making is a social activity. The further you move from that the less appealing it is to me. Overly perfect vocals are just one example. Looped drums, or even just a click track, tend to take the life out of a song. Obviously for some genres that's just how it's done, but imagine what beat quantization and pitch correction, or even just a lot of punching/comping, would have done to Janis Joplin's "Me and Bobby McGee".

I agree more so w the click track and loops than the vocals. Janis Joplin was one of the exceptions and jimi, and Morrison, but people like Robert plant didn't miss a note, and people like steely Dan or CSN would not have been the same had things not been so 'perfect'

But let's face it, the typical semi-professional vocalist, or local guy, is most likely trying to just get the idea across in a presentable manner.

And let's remember probably 80% of the songs on the radio had a click track. Perhaps it was the drummer creating it without a metronome, but a lot of pop and rock was to a metronome. It comes again, down to producing and knowing when sway is feel, and not a mistake.

There's stick clicks all over Zeppelin albums, if you listen to the pauses and stops, especially where cymbal crashes were involved you can catch one or two. It by no means makes the song less beuatiful, of anything it lends authenticity to the performance and reminds you it was real. Listen to 'black dog' from led zeppelins 'IV', closely they are there.

Hate to say it but that's probably something i would edit out now.

I only use a click if the genere necessitates it, or the drummer is problematic. Other than that as long as the band sways together, you imo, get a better product, and faster.

DonnyThompson, post: 434427, member: 46114 wrote: ...Stereo was still a newer thing for pop records at the time; most releases were in mono, because that's what most consumers had at home with their playback systems; along with AM radio, and the "new transistor radio"...

There were some "hi fi" releases available then; mostly classical/orchestral/jazz though, and they were released in that format because that's how they were being recorded, in real time, using mic placement and various arrays to accomplish this. The labels offered these releases to appeal to the "esoteric" crowd, those early audiophiles ...

Both the consoles being wired as switched and the engineers using them that way were both just because they didn't know any better at the time. Not that they weren't talented, those recordings are some of the best ever, and hold up today. But the whole basic concept of a panorama soundstage was new, and just hadn't sunk in quite yet. Even to a genius like George Martin.

But a talented engineer was not limited by this; you could multi-mic with room noise to get true stereo sound, and you could even pan using a pre-mixer if you really wanted to.

My dad was the original tech head, had the first transistor radio anyone had seen, a TR-1, I think, probably in 1954, and blew everyone' mind at the college football games by having the play-by-play up in the stands, where his friends would gather around. Got about half the game before the battery ran out. He also had stereo in 1958, and probably informed my love of jazz, as I fell asleep every night hearing it.