Recording - October 2014 - 57

Probably four or five.
So there was some stuff in there that was
fourth or fifth generation?
If it's a track, yes.
If you decided you wanted to do a string overdub, did you do it after the vocals, or before?
It was really simple. We eventually threw the console
out, but we salvaged the preamps out of it. But it was
still only four microphone inputs. At that point, we were
just in the process of going three-track. Somewhere
along the line, we bought an Altec 1567A mixer, and
we had an Ampex [MX-10] mixer. The staff-built main
console fed one track, the Altec mixer was another
track, and the Ampex mixer was the third track on the
three-track when we were cutting the session.
By the time we had eight-track, we'd added eight
mic pres of our own design, 30 dB gain blocks, and
then we had a whole bunch of attenuators that you
would just patch in, so that you could control the
level going onto the tape machine. The whole room
was the old power-matching system, where everything had to be terminated into 600 ohms, and the
input impedance on everything was 600 ohms.
I think one of the strangest things was that there
were virtually no normals in the patch bay. To get a
session up you had to patch it up. This was what the
recording engineers wanted, because what you
did, you would learn a certain patch, and then you
could do that kind of session. It was job security,
more or less, and it gave a hierarchy to the engineers: how many different patches did you know?

So essentially you had to build the setup each time.
Right. We could configure the patch bay at will to do anything you could
imagine with it, just by plugging and unplugging stuff; it didn't even require a
soldering iron. They were all the old 241 double jacks; you could flip 'em
around and turn the polarity around in the patch bay.

Many houses, many rooms
We built a room a couple of houses down which was essentially for just mixing. It had a 3M player, an old 23 machine, with just playback electronics on
it, and we built this whole console which had a couple of Studers built into it, a
C37 stereo and a mono machine as master mixdown recorders. And then a
board that was custom-made, that would mix eight channels with three echo
returns, with a three-channel echo send.
What were you using for reverb in this era?
Anything and everything. We started out-we had three acoustic chambers. The
first one, the 48 chamber, was just built as a room in the attic at 2648 W. Grand
Blvd., and the ends were squared off-a shoebox, with beveled corners. That was
the echo chamber, the one that was used on all the lead vocals.
You see, after we built that one, we read the books and realized we did it all
wrong; that an echo chamber should have no two parallel surfaces in it. And so
the next building over, at 2644 W. Grand Blvd., we built the 44 chamber. It was
like a pentagon in cross-section, and then one end came way in; it was like a
90° angle at the center. No two parallel surfaces in that one.
And the difference was that the room with the parallel surfaces gave you
echo, and the other one with the non-parallel surfaces gave you reverb. Reverb
is used to enhance pads; it adds width to the mix. Echo will make the vocal just
pop right out of the track; it adds real depth to the mix.
The third chamber was this monstrosity with no parallel surfaces, built into half of the
attic; it was way too small. It was our stereo chamber, we put an SM 2 Neumann mic
into it. And everybody, when you'd ask 'em what they thought of that chamber, they
said, "We have a third echo chamber?" It was bad; it didn't sound worth a damn.

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Recording - October 2014

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