[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
good that is, the same on all record players.
As the sound quality of the first stereo releases was mixed at best, consumers adopted a wait-and-
see attitude. Stereophonic records accounted for just 6 percent of total sales in December 1958, one
year after their debut. Gradually, as recording quality improved, so did stereo record sales. More
important, most people went out and bought new stereo record players rather than convert their old
mono players. By the early 1960s, the stereo disc had silenced the reel-to-reel tape format. RCA,
Columbia, and Minnesota s 3-M Company each test-marketed a primitive form of tape cartridge in
the late 1950s. Unsurprisingly, these paperback-sized boxes didn t fly.
For the music industry, the sudden proliferation of stereo players brought an onslaught of new
sounds not all of them strictly musical. That easy listening label turns out to be rather a misnomer.
The Sound of Living Stereo
Mood music is perhaps the 20th century s most authentic music, tailored exclusively for
the electronic revolution. These recordings fully exploit the intended use of the hi fi and
stereo as domestic appliances and with all of the environmental controls of thermostats, air
conditioners, and security systems.
Joseph Lanza
The extended length of the LP and improved sound quality of hi-fi fostered the excesses of the
easy listening format including kitschy mood music. The presence of canned pop tunes piped into
offices and elevators by the Muzak Company and others created a precedent of subliminal, lulling
background music outside the home. In the shopping centers and dentist offices of the sixties,
background music seemed omnipresent.
Wall-to-wall fullness and sonic melodrama mark even the mellowest examples. From Mantovani
to Mancini, Kostelanetz to the Ray Coniff Singers, these records utilized the full range of stereo sound
so that one could display one s expensive components tastefully.
For devotees, there existed a strange subgenre known as the stereo-demonstration disc. Even the
renowned audiophile and historian Roland Gelatt had to acknowledge the underlying absurdity.
Bizarre recordings of thunderstorms and screaming railroad trains were concocted for those to whom
high-fidelity reproduction was an end in itself and not a means of musical reproduction. Accordingly,
the first Audio Fidelity stereo release featured the Dukes of Dixieland on one side and Railroad
Sounds on the flip.
The fad eventually died down, but at its peak, an album titled Persuasive Percussion by Enoch
Light sat at number one on the Billboard charts for thirteen weeks in 1960. Along with its follow-up,
Provocative Percussion, the album illustrated stereo sound with ludicrous Ping-Pong effects
ricocheting between the speakers. According to the liner notes, When you acquire a Command
recording you will have the pleasure of hearing the ultimate in true stereo recording and you can feel
that your record library has grown in stature.
Apart from the novelty appeal of such records, what really spread the popularity of stereo was
miniaturization. The shrinking process began even before the introduction of transistor technology,
and bookshelf speakers boomed out the full range of sound in the early sixties. By the seventies, when
audio components were completely transistorized, stereo sound ruled the universe. In the boom times
before the advent of home computers, the audio market represented the cutting edge of hightech
amusement.
Hardware development outpaced software. Music thus had to play catch-up with technology, and
musicians struggled to master the tools suddenly available to them. In stereo, the art and science of
recording became doubly complex and challenging.
Music for Heads
A physicist will tell you that space is allied to time, but a record producer will argue that it
is closely allied to sound as well.
George Martin
Another reason why multitrack recording was delayed in the pop market is that musicians were
used to playing with one another. With overdubbing, each instrument performs a discrete job. Group
interplay is replaced by a method of recording with exacting precision. The ability to perfect an
individual performance after the fact slowly eroded the need to have people playing together at all. No
more repeated takes in the studio mistakes were taped over, new sounds dubbed in.
Vocals benefited (or suffered) the most, as they were easiest to isolate and manipulate in the mix.
By the early 1960s, a new generation of tape recorders that used three heads (compared to Les Paul s
Hydra four) enabled engineers to edit or cut and paste entire sections of a song while remaining in
synch with the overall tempo and melody. Records would now be put together piece by piece as well
as part by part. Suddenly, recording a song from start to finish seemed unnecessary.
How many tracks can fit on the head of a pin, or a single strip of tape? The number multiplied
slowly, from two to four to eight in the 1960s, then rapidly shot up to sixty-four and more today. For
the current generation of musicians, the recording studio has come to be regarded as more than a
resource or even the means to an end: it is now the fundamental instrument for making popular music.
Who got here first? It was those omnipresent sixties idols, the Beatles, who pioneered the use of
the recording studio as musical instrument. Producer George Martin mentored the Beatles, musically
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]