Recording - October 2014 - 62

Motown engineer Tony Bongiovi, my unit was confirmed to be
a mastering equalizer custom-made by the in-house technical
engineering shop at Motown Studios. Moreover, they offered to
put me in touch with Motown engineer/chief tech Mike McLean,
who built much of the gear at Hitsville USA. (See the interview
with McLean's colleague John Windt elsewhere in this issue for
more about Motown's studios in the early days.)

2. Inside top view of the Motown Mastering EQ shows a clean,
handwired design, with Electrocube capacitors and carbon
composition resistors. A second (similar-looking) circuit board
is viewable only by removing the lower cover. Not visible are
the inductors, which are mounted under the circuit boards.
McLean began working at Motown at age 20 in January of
1961-just six months after the company formed-and remained
on staff until 1972. (See Picture 3.) He's a friendly guy and was
glad to share a few memories and insights into the technology
and process that drove Motown in the early days, as well as help
solve some mysteries about my equalizer.
Gearing up
Motown's first console was a vintage Western Electric mixer
bought with some other gear from Bristol Bryant, a disk jockey at
radio station WJLB. Also part of that package was a Ampex 3512 dual-channel recorder, but used at Motown as a multitrack.
"We'd put the band on one channel, the vocals on the other," says
McLean. "We'd then mix that to mono onto an Ampex 400. That
1939 Western Electric mixer was funky by the time we got it, but
it worked and was used to record one of Motown's first hit
records-Mary Wells 'Bye Bye Baby'." It was her first single and
charted at #8 on Billboard's R&B chart in December of 1960.
The system was OK, but what Motown really wanted-but could
not afford-was an Ampex 300-3S, a half-inch, 3-track deck with
Sel-Sync overdubbing capability, a recorder that was a standard
among larger pro music studios. Unfortunately, with a 1961 price
tag of $6000 (equivalent to $47,000 in today's dollars), there was
no way the fledgling Motown label could afford an Ampex 300-3S.
McLean came up with the idea of building a 1/2" 3-track, a project he felt could be done for about $1500, which Gordy
approved. "I just figured we'd get some new Ampex 3-track heads,
and I could build the record electronics. I had built a lot of Heathkits
and I had a lot of friends who built things. We got a tape deck from
Edgar Lesher in Ann Arbor, who was an aeronautical engineer
and had a sideline of building tape recorders in his basement.
Lesher's homebrew tape decks were similar to Ampex 350s and
were pretty good. We set it up with 1/2" tape guides, put the
Ampex tape heads on there, and I built three electronics assemblies
and a Sel-Sync style panel so we could play back tracks while overdubbing on others. It worked pretty well," adds McLean.
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RECORDING October 2014

The first song recorded on Motown's 3-track was "Please Mr.
Postman" by The Marvelettes, which became Motown's first #1
hit in December, 1961. Years later, that same homebrew
approach was applied when McLean and crew built their own
8-track on a 1" transport, again at a time when only a few elite
studios had access to 8-channel technology.
As the 3-track recorder project was coming along, it was
clear that the Western Electric mixer was inadequate for the
task. This was in an era that large, multi-input consoles were simply unavailable (not that Motown could afford one at the time)
and most studios had custom-built designs. The solution came in
the form of a little of each.
"The mixer at Motown was a combination of three mixers,"
McLean recalls. "Channel One was for the voices and lead
singers; the second channel was for the band-horns, tambourines, etc.; and the third channel was for the rhythm section,
with the drums and bass-that was the three-track layout on the
recorder. We used a 5-input Altec 1567A mixer for channel
one, a 4-input Ampex MX-10 mixer for channel three. We had
built a mixer for tracking the band which doubled as a mixdown
mixer to the full-track mono 1/4" master tape cut on an Ampex
351." The arrangement is shown in Picture 4.
In terms of building/tweaking studio gear, "all the stuff we did
just made it more convenient for them to get the job done. They
had a will to create records one way or another. Berry Gordy
was a former boxer and had learned early on that unless you put
some effort into something, you won't get anything out. He was
a hard worker and did everything he could to get the best possible recording from whatever he was working with. He paid to
send me to AES shows so I could turn myself from a hi-fi bug into
someone who actually understood the subtleties of engineering."
Studio monitors
"We had Altec 605As [coaxial 15-inch speakers], which
were similar to 604s but they deviated and were screechier with
a lot more treble. They were mounted in a couple of ElectroVoice Aristocrat cabinets which were designed for a 12-inch
speaker instead of a 15. The 605A was one product where
Altec really got off track and most people didn't like them. They
were screamers-way too loud-and it's a miracle that anyone
could ever hear anything after working there for a while."
There was also some experimentation a lot with Hi-Fi type monitors. "The Acoustic Research AR-3a speakers were much more natural sounding than the Altec 605As. The main problem with the AR
speakers is that the staff would blow them out by playing them too
loud," McLean notes. "We finally gave up, but eventually went with
the Altec 604Es around 1967. These were smoother than the
605As-still screechy-but could take the beating and keep
going. We'd equalize them as well as we could and they didn't
sound too bad. The Tannoy Monitor Gold Dual Concentrics were
tough and sounded much better, but after all the fuss I'd been put
through on the Altecs, I didn't want to get involved in that argument
again and they were still using the Altecs when I left in 1972."
Disk cutting: a secret revealed
Back to the mystery equalizer that got me started on this quest
for early Motown history, McLean verified the EQ I bought was
indeed from Motown's disk cutting room. But the real surprise came
from his explanation about the "half/normal" frequency switch in
the lower right corner of the front panel. I had originally thought
that this was merely a way of offering additional frequency options
beyond its seven bands. But in a quest for increased fidelity and
"hotter" releases, Motown was doing half-speed mastering in its
early days-a process that I was not even aware of until it began
to rise in commercial popularity in the late 1970s.
"We got into disk cutting fairly early on," McLean explains.
"We'd cut test reference acetates, so they could compare that to
other records to make up their mind if the mix was right; and we
would cut lacquers, which were used for disk pressing. The first

Recording - October 2014

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