Link: THE GREAT JIM REEVES 8 CD SET
Jim Reeves sang so softly and so close to the microphone, his voice wasn't loud enough to reflect off surfaces anyway. Velma Smith, who often played rhythm guitar sitting right in front of Jim only a few feet away, told me she often couldn't even hear him sing! She gauged her playing by what the other instruments were doing. The musicians did not wear headphones in those days, nor did the singers, so you can imagine the challenge this presented to a pianist situated across the room from Reeves, as he couldn't hear Jim! It's amazing any of this came together.
I have been in Studio B and the first thing one notices when the door is shut is how quiet the room is. The same was true of old radio studios.
But this produces a "dry" sound that seems unnatural to the listener. So engineers would add reverb -- but in a controlled fashion. They did so through two methods at RCA. The first was by piping the sound up to an attic room that had been outfitted with speakers, and re-recording it with a microphone on a pulley system that could change the distance from the speakers and thereby add more or less of a reverb effect.
But as I explain in my book, "Jim Reeves: His Untold Story," when engineer Bill Porter joined RCA, he made big changes, just before Jim recorded "He'll Have To Go." He had "plate reverb" units installed. These were sheets of thin metal suspended in wooden cases, the plates being under tension within a rigid frame via springs or clamps attached to the corners. A transducer similar to the voice-coil of a cone loudspeaker was used to inject audio energy into the plate and two or more contact microphones fixed to the surface of the plate then picked up the vibrations inside it and fed them to preamps connected to the console effect returns. By feeding the different contact mics to left and right channels, a pseudo stereo reverb output was created.
Because the plate is very sensitive to external sounds and vibrations, it has to be mounted in a soundproof box, ideally on shockmounts. These were kept cold up above Studio B for a better, brighter effect.
Unlike today's digital reverbs, which have innumerable adjustable parameters, the plate reverb relies purely on EQ for tonality and physical damping for decay-time control (usually via a motorized felt pad). "Decay" refers to the amount of time sound takes to dissipate.
Mr. Porter's introduction of this new equipment just as Jim was recording his biggest hit, improved the sound quality of his voice and all his subsequent recordings. However, Bill felt studio B was TOO dead, and in some cases, notes played by different instruments cancelled each other out because they were on the same frequency. So he installed what came to be called "Porter's pyramids" -- pieces of acoustical tile that he had purchased out of the petty cash fund, then cut into triangular shapes and suspended from the ceiling on varying lengths of string. They were high enough up you can't see these in most photos of Studio B at the time.
Despite an improved reverb effect, it could also be overdone. There is too much reverb, for instance, on Jim's voice on "I Guess I'm Crazy," as can be discerned by listening solely to his vocal track, sans instrumentation, (as I have done).
In the earliest days, when Jim was recording songs for Abbott at the KWKH radio station in Shreveport, Louisiana (on Saturday nights, the one time a week the station signed off the air for a few hours), the engineer there (whom I interviewed), was using "slap back" tape echo. This was never a good solution, though on some of the early rockabilly tunes, the exaggerated echo effect became part of what sold the songs.
In "slap back," a loop of tape passes around a series of heads starting with an erase head, followed by a record head fed from the signal to be treated. Playback heads are positioned after the record head to provide the echoes, and some of the delayed signal is fed back into the record circuitry to create decaying echoes. Delay time is varied by switching heads or varying the tape speed.
Among the problems with this system was the restricted frequency response of a loop of tape that's been dragged over a set of tape heads thousands of times. The tube circuitry of the original models also had a limited bandwidth and introduced a significant amount of harmonic distortion. This, combined with tape's tendency to saturate meant that when feedback was used, successive echoes became less bright and more distorted, creating a sense of the sound receding into the distance. On top of that, there was instability in the tape path caused by worn rubber pinch rollers that translated into low-level pitch modulation.
A lot of Jim's demos (an example being "The Storm"), I suspect were done using the more primitive "slap back echo," which is impossible even in the digital age for us to remove. It is frustrating to hear good songs ruined by these sonic imperfections.
On the other hand, I got a lucky break when working with Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney tracks that were recorded in studios but, curiously, were captured "dry," with no reverb applied. I'm still not sure why this was, though they were intended initially only for radio broadcast. On the one hand it gave these recordings an intimate sound in that it seems as if the two singers are standing only a few feet in front of you. But the sound also seemed rather "dead."
So on the "Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney: The New Recordings" CD (http://www.good-music.biz/bing.html), we were able to ADD reverb. We experimented with at least 20 to 30 different reverb settings until we found the correct ones. Since most of their recordings were only done with a three piece combo, the instrumentation was sparse, and hence it didn't matter that we applied new digital reverb to the entire mono recording. What stood out was their voices.
This enabled me to give them a far more natural sounding ambience -- a "commercial sound" -- and then of course I also placed them in new musical settings, surrounding them with new instrumentation.
But that's a whole other ballgame because "mixing" -- deciding the placement of the instruments within the aural spectrum, and adjusting their volume -- is quite an art. I don't profess to be an expert. Although I reluctantly get involved in hands-on mixing, I usually try to leave that to my experts, and then critique what they have done.
I generally assign the instruments to a particular channel and "pan" them accordingly (move their sound more to the left or right by a certain percentage so it gives the recording "stereo width" and does not all sound like it is coming from the center), and do this based on what would be the typical layout of an orchestra on a stage. This is complicated by the fact that in a lot of cases, my overdubs are assembled from separate tracks recorded by various freelance musicians in studios hundreds, or even thousands of miles apart, then sent to me for assembly. On occasion, however -- such as when recording string sections -- I have had a bunch of musicians in a room all together, and that's my favorite.
On a recent overdub of a new jazz-influenced CD, I felt we had the saxophone up too high, so we brought it down by -2 dB, and it now sounds perfect. We have the luxury of being able to tweak these whereas in Jim's day, recordings were done "on the fly," within only a few hours' time. It is a reflection of their true greatness that a lot of artists in Jim's era still sound so good today, given the conditions under which their recordings were made.
As producer I control all aspects of a recording so, as Jim used to say, "if you don't like it, you can blame me entirely."
So doing an 8 CD set like "The Great Jim Reeves," with over 170 tracks, is A LOT of work, as you can imagine.
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