Recording - October 2016 - 80

Van Gelder's Secret
Guest editorial by Paul J. Stamler
On August 25th of this year we lost
one of the giants of recording: Rudy Van
Gelder, who recorded artists like John
Coltrane, Miles Davis, Horace Silver
and Sonny Rollins. In the words of Peter
Keepnews's obituary in the New York
Times, his recordings "helped define the
sound of jazz on record." (Less famously, he also recorded folk and blues musicians for small labels in the 1950s and
1960s.)
Van Gelder was secretive about his
recording techniques. Famously so! Terry
Gross came to his Englewood Cliffs (NJ)
recording studio to tape an interview for
Fresh Air, her famous interview program
on WHYY Radio that is broadcast
nationally on NPR. She clapped her

Was it the room? Musicians who
recorded in Van Gelder's studio/home in
Englewood Cliffs (which he built in 1959
from his own design) testified in interviews that the room was live and unusually well-balanced; players in one part of
the room never overwhelmed their bandmates, and they could hear one another
exceptionally well. But that wasn't
unique; many studios contemporary with
Van Gelder's, like Columbia's 23rd Street
Studio in New York or Bill Putnam's
rooms in Chicago and California, had
similar acoustic characteristics.
So the secret wasn't in what Van
Gelder used, since it was pretty much
standard for the era; it must have been
what he did that was different. It wasn't
his choice of musicians; he was an engineer, not a producer, and choosing
musicians was definitely the producer's
job, not his.
How did he place the musicians? We
have no reliable information about that,
but we do hear that he worked hard to
find the right placement of instruments
and microphones, sometimes rearranging

the room: clear, clean, and always distinct from the background. On a Van
Gelder recording, you always knew who
was playing, where they were playing
and what they were playing-and how
that fit in with the rest of the ensemble.
Like Coltrane (or any other great musician) Rudy Van Gelder knew his instruments backward and forward. Coltrane
knew just how to place his lips on the reed
to get exactly the tonal color he wanted;
just how to tickle the valves for those dazzling runs. Rudy Van Gelder knew his
instruments intimately and intuitively too,
but his instruments were the microphones
and the room. He knew that if he put the
sax player here and the bassist there, he'd
get the sound he wanted. He knew when
to use controlled leakage to accent space,
and when to use baffles and rearrange
players to stop the leakage and create isolation. He began his recording career in
his parents' house, and got to know that
space intimately; when he built the
Englewood Cliffs house/studio, he used
every acoustician's trick to make the space
responsive to his needs.

It may be hubris on my part, but I think I've figured out the secret of Rudy Van
Gelder's recordings, and why he took such pains to keep it under wraps...
hands with the recorder running as a
mic check. Van Gelder immediately
insisted, before he would go on with the
interview, that she destroy the hand-clap
recording in his presence. Why? So that
no one could decode the acoustical
properties of his studio from the decay
pattern of this impulse response. So,
yes... secretive is a good word.
Despite his reticence, I think I've figured out the secret of Van Gelder's success in making good-sounding records.
What was it? Yes, he used excellent
microphones like Neumann U 47s, and
high-quality electronics, along with topnotch tape recorders from Ampex (and
later, digital recorders from Sony). All
great gear, but other people used the
same equipment in those years, and no
one's recordings sounded like Van
Gelder's. His recording path was direct;
for many of his classic recordings he
went directly to the 2-track recorder without an intermediate multirack-andmixdown stage. (Multitrack recording
was in its infancy then.) But then, that's
how everyone recorded in those days.
80

RECORDING OCTOBER 2016

people several times-though he was
careful not to tire the musicians out.
It may be hubris on my part, but I
think I've figured out his secret, and why
he took such pains to keep it under
wraps. Here it is: The secret was that
there wasn't actually a secret at all, but
no one saw what was right in front of
them all the time.
Sound paradoxical? In some ways
Rudy Van Gelder's secret was the same
as John Coltrane's, which was the same
as Miles Davis's, which was the same as
Max Roach's. In fact it was the same
secret that every great musician (jazz or
otherwise) carries around: he knew
exactly what he wanted, and how to get
it. Coltrane had a world of sounds in his
head; when he played, he'd make the
saxophone soar, or honk, or cry in pain,
or flip from note to chromatic note. And
when 'Trane improvised, he'd choose
the exact sound that conveyed the emotion he wanted to get across.
So did Van Gelder. He had a picture
in his mind's ear of how he wanted the
musicians he was recording to sound in

And then he stayed there. With the
exception of the occasional excursion to
the Village Vanguard for a live date,
Van Gelder made all of his recordings
before 1959 in his parents' home, and
he made all of his recordings after 1959
in his self-designed studio. He knew
those places (and the Vanguard) so well
that he could make the recordings he
made there sound right.
That's the secret: he knew the sound
he wanted, and he knew his equipment
and recording space so well that he
could make that sound appear. And he
did that for years, until his open, present, well-separated recordings came to
define the era of modern jazz.
To put it briefly, the secret of Rudy Van
Gelder... was Rudy Van Gelder.
Paul J. Stamler (stamler@recordingmag
.com) is a recording engineer, musician,
educator, collector of vintage recordings,
and the author of Recording's monthly
First Steps column for the novice recording musician.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - October 2016