Recording - October 2014 - 56

that do the same thing. If the horns leaked in all
the other tracks, you can't. But at Motown, the
horns were on a track all by themselves, and
nowhere else. And if you wanted them gone,
they were gone.
One of the rooms did horns and strings; one of
the rooms had a set of tympani in it and a harpsichord; another room had a harp and a vibraphone, stuff like that. Just a lot of assorted instruments that would get played on different tunes.
Keeping it isolated was really important.
I left in '68 and came out to California; my first job was putting
together A & M Studios on La Brea, working for Howard Holzer,
who had the contract to put it together. And I tried to explain to
him, "Hey, you need to divide the studio up into, like, six or eight
separate rooms." He just looked at me like I was crazy.
And to this day, the idea of getting the whole band together-I
mean, how can you make records when you have the guitar player
come in, and he puts his part on, and then the flute player comes in
and puts their part on, and then you do a string overdub-nobody
knows what the hell's goin' on. It's no way to make music. You get
everybody together at once, then you say, "Okay, here it is."

Mics in the Snake Pit
Let me go back to the earliest days. What were they using
for microphones at the very beginning?
Three RCA 44 ribbon mics and two Electro-Voice 666s.
And would they use the 666 on just about anything?
Anything and everything, yeah! They got the most use.
That was pretty much it for the main studio, Studio A. The 666s
and the 44BXs left the studio as we went pretty much to largecapsule condensers throughout the entire thing. By the time I had
gotten down there to do the first part-time job, they had already
bought an Ampex 351, and added a Neumann U 48 and U 47
to the mic collection. I think shortly after that they bought a couple
of Sony C-37s. So everything was changing, and then they
bought a couple of Neumann U 67s. About the time we went 8track, they went out and they bought about fifteen more U 67s.
They really liked that microphone?
The idea was, as far as the engineering department was concerned, to capture the sound reliably, and the idea of a microphone adding color which would enhance the sound was something that was foreign, that we thought should be avoided. So
everything was pretty much large-capsule condenser in Studio A.
And the predominant one was the U 67; when you start looking
at old session photos, you don't see anything else on the stands.
We had three kinds of condenser microphones, and the power
supplies sat on a shelf over the control room door. And then we
had Cannon P-8 connectors, which is a big Cannon connector
that has eight pins in it. Each mic was jumpered different ways,
56

RECORDING October 2014

so you could plug it into this cable coming down
from the ceiling; if you got it right, the power supply would automatically turn on, and then you'd
plug it into the input of the mixer you wanted to
use. There were regular XLR connectors hanging
down from the ceiling that stopped about six feet
off the ground, right above your head. That way,
the cables never laid on the floor; they never got
tripped over and so forth. The Funk Brothers
called it the Snake Pit.

No guitar amplifiers aloud
Was bass always taken direct?
Yes, James Jamerson's bass-it was a guitar. All the guitars went
direct. You were not allowed to bring a guitar amplifier into the studio. There was a five-channel guitar DI, and the instruction was, "Plug
this phone connector into your guitar." There was an Altec 605 down
below it, and there was a McIntosh MC30 amplifier driving that.
"Bring the level on your guitar up until the meter moves." And then
adjust the knob on the McIntosh amp to proper listening volume. So
you used your level control on the guitar to get +4 dBu output of the

direct box, and then the knob ran a mixer which fed into the Mac
30 and into the 605, to listen to it. We ended up putting in a toggle
switch that cut off the Mac 30 and just sent it to the headphones.
How did you guys do drums?
The picture of the one session I had going shows Ben
Benjamin playing the drums, and Ivory Joe on the piano, and
Hank Cosby with the horns, everybody. There is an Electro-Voice
636, which I didn't even know we had, shoved in the kick drum,
and there was a U 67 used as the overhead. That's it.
I remember that we took the Steinway, drilled a hole in the
piano lid, bolted an RCA 77 [ribbon mic] onto the piano lid,
and then shut the lid; that was how the piano got miked.

Preamps, bounces and patches
At the beginning the studio had two Ampex 400 mono
machines and a 1937 Western Electric console, which had
been modified and upgraded with Langevin preamps, but it was
still only four microphone inputs.
So how would you do a typical session with that?
You'd get everybody in the room and you'd do it! You'd lay
down the track, and then you'd play the track back and you put
the vocalist up, and they'd sing along as you'd play the track
back on one machine and re-record it on the other. When you
did overdubs, you lost a generation, just bouncing it back and
forth between the two 400s.
How many bounces would they typically do on those early
records?

Recording - October 2014

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