Recording - March 2018 - 72

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SNAPSHOTS FROM RECORDING HISTORY:

THE VOCAL BOOTH
Guest editorial by Scott Dorsey

The notion of the vocal booth as a way to control leakage and make it easier
to control vocal levels independent of the band is not a new one. This photo
was taken in the Columbia session in New York some time between 1946 and
1948 by the great jazz photographer William Gottlieb.
Lena Horne and her Altec 649 vocal microphone are blocked from the band
by means of portable gobos. You can see where the gobos are locked together
in sections like modern office partitions. They were likely made on site by the
Columbia technicians. She has good line of sight with the conductor Lennie
Hayton, who also has good line of sight with the band, but direct sound from
the band is somewhat blocked into her microphone.
I'll remind you that the gobo only blocks sounds down to a certain frequency.
When the wavelength is appreciably longer than the dimensions of the gobo
it does no good at all. The gobo shown is probably useless below maybe 200
Hz or so, but that's fine for a vocal mic that could be highpassed a bit anyway.
72

RECORDING March 2018

The Altec 639 mic was a strange creature
with a ribbon and a dynamic in one package.
The ribbon was a figure-8, the dynamic was
an omni, and you could combine them to make
a cardioid. The sound character changed totally from one pattern to another, like having completely different mics, and not in a good way.
The strings are arranged around a single
RCA 44 figure-8 microphone, which would
have been typical for the era. There's a second
mic boom behind them, likely for the rest of the
band, but that's all blocked in the photo.
Notice the studio walls are heavy plaster
but not treated. This is not a dead-sounding
room at all! This would be a very live room by
modern studio standards, but large enough
that low end problems were well-controlled.
You're seeing in the photo only a small part of
a much larger room.
This was a very common way to record at
the time. There were likely three or four microphones on everything and the engineer has
the ability to adjust balances between vocals,
strings, and brass with panpots. All other balance changes would mean shifting positions
of musicians with respect to the mics.
When multitrack recording came around in
the 1960s, everything changed and isolation
became the word of the day. By the 1980s,
vocalists were being sealed up in glass bottles like some kind of exotic fruit, or forced
to overdub everything without the band to
get absolute and total isolation so that vocals
could be edited and comped and punched in
and out. I'm seeing a move away from that
and back toward the older and more natural
style, and this photo gives a good feeling for
how it was back then.
You can still record this way today... it just takes
good engineering and good musicians.
Scott Dorsey (dorsey@recordingmag.com) is a
big believer in recording with good musicians.

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