Recording - October 2014 - 55

go over, "Okay, what is impedance? What is inductance? What
is capacitance?" and break it all down. I thought he was
teachin' me what audio was all about; I can look back on it now
and see we were teaching each other. Because neither one of
us knew what we were doing. If we actually knew what we
were doing we'd be dangerous [laughs].
We had Howard Tremaine's Audio Cyclopedia, and we were
goin' through it one chapter at a time, until we knew it cold-
absolutely understood it cold. 'Cause that's what it took. It was boiling the whole thing back almost to basic physics, and rebuilding it.

and what they called "perforated Masonite" at the time-some
people call it "pegboard". The back of a pegboard piece had
1" fiberglass on it, and the same with the back of a plywood.
The gypsum tile did not.
And it worked. We used Acoustic Research AR-3s for monitors, a popular and expensive home hi-fi speaker, for all the critical QC work, and the A & R department. We rounded up eight
of 'em, and we put them so all the woofers were together on the
floor, and we actually had achieved a half-second reverb time
at 100 Hz in that room.

Acoustics, Step by Step

Multiple Studios
for Multitrack Recording

The control room and the recording room. Did you do the
acoustical treatment for those?
The control room didn't have any acoustic treatment. All the
surfaces were covered with plywood and Formica so we could
hose it down. [laughs]
The studio originally was a photo studio, and it was just a big room
with a high ceiling in it. Berry bought the thing in '59, and Pop Gordy
knocked a 3 by 4 foot hole in the exterior wall of one of the bedrooms
and put some glass in it, and that became the control room.
Somebody had put acoustic tile on the studio wall, and hung
some velvet drapes in there, as a first attempt at acoustics. The
next thing, across the back wall we added three polycylindrical
diffusers, which absolutely did nothing-they were way too
small. We hired this guy who came in, a well-known acoustician. He said we needed to have all these wedges hanging
from the ceiling, to break it up. We put that in, and it changed

I mean, we knew nothing starting out; it was just self-taught. What
made sense? For instance, we went multitrack, and everybody said,
"The leakage is just horrible. We can't use it, because it's got everything else in it"-because of leakage between instrument mics.
Next: "Okay, let's build three completely isolated rooms next to the
main studio, that will have almost the same square footage."
So we did that. "Okay, now how is everybody going to hear
each other?" Because everybody became aware that you wanted the whole orchestra there. The Funk Brothers were some of
the most unbelievably talented musicians I had ever seen in my
entire life. They'd get in there doing a session, they would feed
off each other: "Why, you do this and I'll do that," and try to
outdo each other. You got killer tracks; you cannot believe the
stuff that came out of that studio that way.
But we wanted to divide 'em up; the only thing that made
sense was, "Okay, we'll hang two mics in a stereo configuration

the sound of the studio, but it still had a somewhat muddy bottom end. Then RCA's head of acoustics stopped by, just after
he'd finished designing the studio in Milan, Italy, and before he
did the studio on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. In half a day
we got a crash course in acoustics.
Acoustics hasn't changed since God invented it way back
when; it's always the same, and to have any effect it's gotta be
massive. What you've got is a frontal wave, and you want to
break it up and absorb it. Sound, when it hits a surface, can
only do two things. It can bounce off of it, or it can impart its
energy to it. It usually does a little of both, depending on the surface and how much energy the sound has.
But that's it. You've got this frontal wave; you want to disperse
it, and you want to soak up the bottom end. You want to obtain
an even reverb time from the lowest frequencies to the highest frequencies. As it turns out, trying to get the reverb time of 100 Hz
down to a half second is extremely difficult, and to keep the reverb
time of 10 kHz up at a half second is also extremely difficult.
So with that in mind I sat down at the drawing board and
drew up the actual acoustics that Studio A had. Let's see, when
did we build that? Probably the end of '65, I think we put that
in. The treatment on all four walls, the maximum depth was three
and a half feet, and the minimum depth was close to 20 inches.
You could almost walk behind it. A lot of gypsum tile, plywood,

in each one of the rooms, and then we'll put a little mixer in each
room so we can blend the four rooms together any way we deem
necessary." Then we put two microphones in the system; one sat
on the console, and it had five pushbuttons. You could talk to any
one of the rooms independently, or you could talk to them all, just
by pushing the button. We had a podium out in the studio with
one of those boxes and a microphone on it.
So when you walked in, and picked up your headphones and
put 'em on, the only control you had in the whole thing was, how
loud did you want your phones? All the walls would disappear; it
was like everybody was in the same room, and it was totally out
of the recording engineer's hands. It was a self-contained system.
The producer was out in the studio; we didn't encourage them
to be in the control room. He would sing the lead into the microphone on his podium, so that everybody knew what the vocal
was about, and where they could put their licks in and everything. The whole thing made so much sense, it isn't even funny.
It's a way of letting people play together without leakage.
One of the rooms was set up, and either horns or strings were
put in there. Horns or strings, they make pads in the music, for
the rest of the tune to work off of. They serve the same function,
essentially. And horns are really loud.
So you record the thing with horns, and you decide that horns
don't really fit, and you want to replace the horns with strings
RECORDING October 2014

Recording - October 2014

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