Posted by Allen Chandler on September 19, 2014, 9:53 pm
Hi Larry
What was RCA thinking when they produced the LP He'll Have to Go and Other Favorites in electronic stereo. It sounds horrible. I found a mono copy in a second hand record shop and I prefer listing to that. I've heard other electronic stereo LPs such as The Best of Jim Reeves Vol.2 and they sound good.
My question is what process did they use to make it sound the way it does and why.
When you listen to a live musical performance, the characteristics of the room you are in have an affect on what you hear, as the sound bounces off the walls, ceiling, etc. So the sound is heard from various directions. This gives it "presence" or "ambience."
In the days before stereophonic recording and reproduction were invented, commercial recordings were only in mono. Think of a radio with one speaker. The sound originated from one small source.
Movies were the first to introduce stereo, in which the high and low frequencies of a recorded piece could at least be divided and dispersed across more than one speaker, to give the aural illusion of dimension.
The first stereo LPs were not released until 1958, and even after Jim began recording on equipment that was capturing three channels (with one of these typically reserved for the vocals), engineers at RCA (and other labels) were mixing these down to mono because that's all that radio stations and jukeboxes were playing. The sound was one-dimensional and "flat."
There were even documented cases where the original three-track masters were lost so all that was left was the mixed-down mono.
Anyway, when RCA and other labels wanted to issue stereo albums using mono masters, they came up with a gimmick -- "electronically reprocessed stereo." This, of course, was in the days before computers.
The technique involved creating some spatial distribution of frequencies, typically by sending the low frequencies to the left channel and the high frequencies to the right channel. If they'd stopped at that, it might have sounded pretty good.
However, someone also got the idea to add very short-space time "delays" (not echos) and phase distortions of the mono signals. This unfortunately created a very "echo-ey" effect like the vocalists were singing in the bathroom. It was pretty awful on some of Jim's recordings.
But this didn't just affect Mr. Reeves. For a long time in the 1960s, even Elvis' classic '50s tracks were only available this way -- in "electronically reprocessed stereo."
Nowadays, in the digital age, there are tremendous new resources at our command which can help us improve old recordings.
For example, when working on "The Divine Ms. Cline," -- the release VoiceMasters produced with H&H Music Ltd. in England featuring 20 of Patsy Cline's masters plus some unreleased live material -- we did not have the original three track masters available. But we took pristine vinyl and then identified and zeroed in on the frequencies of certain instruments to turn them up or down in volume. I was able to give Patsy a "vocal boost" to separate her from some overwhelming original backgrounds that obscured her beautiful voice. (Hear samples at: http://www.patsyclinemusic.net)
Anyone who has purchased that CD can compare, for instance, the original versions of any of her songs to the redone ones on my CD, and without any doubt at all you will be able to hear her much better on the new release.
I was VERY proud of the fact that on a discussion board that attracts heavy traffic consisting of many music industry professionals (including other producers and engineers), as well as scores of intelligent audiophiles, there was a recent discussion of the Patsy CD, in which the presumption on their part was that I had worked from the three-track original masters! My team and I got a chuckle out of that. We regarded that as a high compliment because we managed to even fool the experts, who thought we had "started fresh" with clean tracks that were then orchestrated with beautiful new music.
Fans and professional music critics have also made the same observation regarding the new 8 CD set, "The Great Jim Reeves" which I produced. Over and over and over we see people commenting on how they have never heard Jim's voice with such clarity and beauty before!
We worked on these tracks laboriously for months, fine-tuning every little aspect, dropping an entire channel when possible to get rid of as much of the original instrumentation as we could so as to allow for a new, better musical arrangement to be substituted.
Even on tracks I did not overdub, like "I Won't Forget You," you will hear Jim with astonishing new warmth and clarity. The same with "Welcome To My World" (although I added oboe to that).
It is very gratifying to be able to take old tracks and polish them up and make them shine better than ever before.
Those of Jim's fans who don't bother to buy any of the new CDs I've produced, thinking they already have the music and nothing could be better than the originals, are really missing out.
Because we have exposed Jim's voice in places where you never heard him before. The Country Music People article by David Allan points out that -- aside from Patsy's original -- he has never heard a better version of "I Fall To Pieces" than the new overdub on "The Great Jim Reeves," featuring Jim with Kenzie Wetz.
Compare the original version (from the "Touch of Velvet" album) with ours. Our arrangement is deliberately more "country sounding" with fiddle and steel guitar, etc. than the pop original. When Jim starts to sing, you hear him SO MUCH BETTER than you ever could on the RCA original where he was backed with the string section and saxophone. And yet -- miraculously -- you won't hear a trace of the original backing.
(I'm sure at least one of the loonies who is always dogging my heels will rush to point out that there were a few "voice isolation" tracks floating around on Jim, but they should re-listen to those if they have them; they will find those were NOT all that clean and there was an awful lot of leakage into Jim's mic. But all of that is GONE on our tracks. We did not use any of the old RCA isolation stuff. On the other hand, I have no intention of revealing any of our proprietary secrets as to how we accomplished such stunning results. I worked with some incredibly skilled people. The "cherry on top" was the expert mastering by one of the top engineers in the nation -- Scott Barnett).
You need to do yourself a favor and buy this set. 8 CDs, over 170 tracks, SPECTACULAR SOUND.
We've come a long, long way since the days of "electronically reprocessed stereo."
Click the link below to hear samples and to order... (And don't forget about the wonderful CD "Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney: The New Recordings," which has sound that is out of this world. You can hear samples at: http://www.good-music.biz/bing.html)
A few more points about sound. In most recording studios (and RCA's Studio B was a good example), the rooms have acoustic tiles and/or angular panels to deaden or absorb the sound so during the recording process they don't pick up unwanted deflection. They want to be able to control that.
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 (https://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.
Posted by Allen Chandler on September 20, 2014, 6:56 pm, in reply to "More thoughts on sound"
Thanks Larry for the history lesson on sound recording. I noticed there is a slight time delay between the left channel and the right channel on the album I mentioned earlier. Like I said I'll play the mono copy instead of the fake stereo one. At least it doesn't sound like it was recorded in an echo chamber.
Re: More thoughts on sound
Posted by David MacBeth on September 25, 2014, 5:58 pm, in reply to "More thoughts on sound"
I guess I'm crazy,but I liked the 'echo' on 'The Storm'.