Recording - March 2012 - 8

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Motown memories In our January 2012 issue we published an article by Paul J. Stamler entitled “Recording Drums—Then and Now.” Paul did his best to provide information about some periods in recording history where written records are scarce, and as might be expected, he got at least a couple of things slightly wrong. A few weeks after we went to press, we received a phone call from John Windt, who first visited Motown in January 1961 and who began working there in 1963, his tenure lasting until 1968, right around the time Bob Ohlsson started there. Our initial chat with Mr. Windt was fun and informative, and he told us that he had a complete photographic record of recording setups and room designs from his time at Motown. We’re making a date to do a proper interview with Mr. Windt, but until then, he’s offered us some corrected information about recording at Motown in the early years: “At the time I first visited Motown in January 1961, there were three RCA 44s in the studio, two RCA 77DXs, and two Electro-Voice 666 mics. The next mics they added were a Neumann U 47 and U 48, followed by two Sony C37As, and later on, five Neumann U 67s. When I was working at Motown, up until 1968, there were no Neumann KM mics in use there.” “The basement was never turned into a Studio B when I was there. It was basically a room where they dug out the dirt down to the foundation base and then poured a concrete slab; with the air ducts, ceiling clearance was only about 5'11" and I was 6'3" — when I worked down there (repairing and building the gear) I felt a bit like the Hunchback of Notre Dame! The instrumentalists actually tracked in a room in the old duplex that had originally been set up as a photo studio. Berry Gordy knocked a hole in the wall from the bedroom to the photo studio and put in a piece of glass... the bedroom became the control room and the photo studio was the tracking room.” “I have a photograph here of a session where they have Benny Benjamin’s drum kit set up; this would have been 1966 or 1967. There’s an Electro-Voice 636 next to the kick drum’s outer head. The kick had both heads on and I don’t believe it had anything put inside it at all.” We’d like to thank AEA’s Wes Dooley for kindly introducing us to Mr. Windt; we look forward to bringing you more of his stories of Motown’s studio setup, acoustics, early gear choices, working methods, and more, in a future issue.—MM History can be good for you Dear Paul Stamler: Hello there, I just wanted to let you know I really enjoyed reading your article on recording drums throughout history. Very insightful and inspiring. Reading stuff like that makes me feel rejuvenated, like I do after going to AES... it makes me question everything and makes me feel like trying new (or old) things. If only we had more time to experiment... nowadays in studios, time is of the essence and I always end up going with (my) tried and true techniques because people want to get rolling fast, rather than spending time trying mics, preamps, positions etc.! Thanks again for the great article. I’ll pass it on to my Rogers-fanatic boss and engineering mentor, owner of the studio where I work... He’ll love it!
Marc Urselli www.marcurselli.com

Mic mod resources I saw an article from Scott Dorsey on modifying Chinese mics on Recording’s website [Editor’s note: the article is available for free in our Article Library, at http://tinyurl.com/RecMagMakingMicsBetter] and wondered if the kit was still being offered; I could not date the article so I was not sure. Thanks,
Ross Arnold via email

Scott Dorsey replies: The article is in fact from the January 2002 issue, but as noted above, it is now available for free on Recording’s website. More to the point, the parts kits described in the article are still available and the price is still $20. The kit now also includes the two transistors since in the past decade it has become harder to get quiet transistors. It also comes with a current Digi-Key parts list. For an extra $5 you can also get standoffs, which make assembly easier. They let you keep the high voltage stuff off of the board, so you don’t have to be quite so careful about defluxing the thing. You don’t need to use them, but if you want them, it’s $25 for the whole thing instead of $20. The PO box and ordering information in the article remains the same. Believe it or not, I still have boards for projects I published in the late 1970s available....—SD Correction Yes, we caught it too, just a hair too late to stop the presses. In our interview with Eddie Kramer (February 2012), a mis-transcription led to the erroneous “Led Zeppelin drummer John Paul Jones”. Of course Jones was Zep’s bassist/keyboardist, and John Bonham (discussed later in the interview) was Zep’s drummer.—MM

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RECORDING MARCH 2012

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Recording - March 2012

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