Recording - July 2019 - 60
Throwback
to the Future
By Samantha Blanchard
The Blues is hailed as "America's Music". It's the foundation of
nearly every current popular genre. But for such a famous music
style, how it was first recorded isn't that well known. One Blues
artist takes a techie look back, and discovers how the most creative
minds in the business are using old techniques to move forward.
up as many Blues acts as they could get
their corporate hands on. Some of the most
legendary names in Blues like Charley Patton, Lead Belly, and Muddy Waters were
all originally recorded during this period
between the mid-1920s and early 1940s.
W.C. Handy became the stuff of music
legend and "The Father of the Blues," according to some. And in the way history
always does, the story of that unusual music from Mississippi making its way to the
mainstream repeated itself.
Gimmicks and gizmos
TuTwiler STaTion
A Chance Encounter
In 1903, a song composer by the
name of W.C. Handy sat at a train station
in Tutwiler, Mississippi. While waiting
for his connection he listened to a man
play the strings of a guitar with a knife-
a sound Handy would later describe as
haunting. Some years further into his
career, that strange music became the
hallmark of W.C. Handy's songwriting
style and thus, Blues was popularized for
the first time. As the Twenties roared, so
did Handy's prominence as a published
writer. The first African-American to ever
record a Blues record, Mamie Smith,
began her singing career when she cut
"That Thing Called Love" and "You Can't
Keep a Good Man Down" for OKeh
records in 1920-both original Handy
60 RECORDING July 2019
compositions. And within a few short
years, the 78 RPM record had dethroned
printed sheet music as the industry's leading physical commodity.
The enormous success of "race records," as they quickly came to be known,
was seen in the rural outreaches of the
Deep South, where tensions of the Civil
War were still felt. In the Mississippi Delta, where the sharecropper system was
still very much alive, the weekends were
crawling with street musicians and workers
looking to blow off steam at the neighborhood bars and juke joints. So as record
companies caught whiff of a bubbling new
buying market, a market largely untouched
by radio, labels like Columbia and Paramount descended upon the area like hungry Cajuns on a pot of gumbo, scooping
In 1917, the Port Washington-based
Wisconsin Chair Company got into the
business of making records. The decision
was a gimmicky one, made in an effort to
push the sales of their new phonograph
record player design, having manufactured the wooden cabinets of Edison's
design for some time. In its infancy, the
company that would later call itself Paramount Records recorded musical acts
as quickly and as cheaply as possible. In
its "New York Recording Laboratories,"
ironically located at its facility in Wisconsin, the fledgling label used the acoustic
recording technology of the phonograph
to cut countless commercial flops into
wax cylinders and 12" discs.
As was typical of the pre-console era,
performers gathered around a large,
cone-shaped horn at the front of a recording space, and positioned themselves according to who should be the
loudest on the record. As electrified mics
had not yet made their appearance in
the recording studio, this oversized horn
was the only method of capturing sound.
A player's proximity to it was the only
control recording engineers of the time
had over their respective mixes. And
as the band played ferociously into the
horn, the sound pressure in the air made
its way through the cone and down to
Recording - July 2019
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - July 2019
Fade In
Fast Forward
That One Mic: Electric Guitar
Christone "Kingfish" Ingram: Capturing the sound of blues guitar
IK Multimedia AXE I/O
IK Multimedia iRig Stomp I/O
BOSS Waza Craft CE-2W Chorus and DC-2W Dimension C
Lauten LS-308
Strymon Volante
Vance Powell - recording and mixing the Stray Cats latest album 40
PSI Audio A17-M
STL Tones STL Tonality–Howard Benson
LEWITT LCT 040 MATCH
Throwback To The Future
GFI System Clockwork Delay V3
Recording - July 2019 - Intro
Recording - July 2019 - Cover1
Recording - July 2019 - Cover2
Recording - July 2019 - 1
Recording - July 2019 - 2
Recording - July 2019 - 3
Recording - July 2019 - Fade In
Recording - July 2019 - 5
Recording - July 2019 - 6
Recording - July 2019 - 7
Recording - July 2019 - Fast Forward
Recording - July 2019 - 9
Recording - July 2019 - 10
Recording - July 2019 - 11
Recording - July 2019 - That One Mic: Electric Guitar
Recording - July 2019 - 13
Recording - July 2019 - 14
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Recording - July 2019 - Christone "Kingfish" Ingram: Capturing the sound of blues guitar
Recording - July 2019 - 17
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Recording - July 2019 - 20
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Recording - July 2019 - IK Multimedia AXE I/O
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Recording - July 2019 - 24
Recording - July 2019 - 25
Recording - July 2019 - IK Multimedia iRig Stomp I/O
Recording - July 2019 - 27
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Recording - July 2019 - BOSS Waza Craft CE-2W Chorus and DC-2W Dimension C
Recording - July 2019 - 35
Recording - July 2019 - Lauten LS-308
Recording - July 2019 - 37
Recording - July 2019 - Strymon Volante
Recording - July 2019 - 39
Recording - July 2019 - Vance Powell - recording and mixing the Stray Cats latest album 40
Recording - July 2019 - 41
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Recording - July 2019 - 43
Recording - July 2019 - PSI Audio A17-M
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Recording - July 2019 - STL Tones STL Tonality–Howard Benson
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Recording - July 2019 - Throwback To The Future
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Recording - July 2019 - LEWITT LCT 040 MATCH
Recording - July 2019 - 71
Recording - July 2019 - GFI System Clockwork Delay V3
Recording - July 2019 - Cover3
Recording - July 2019 - Cover4
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