INTRO SESSION SHENANIGANS
The studio guitarist’s guide to happiness and personal fulfilment, as related by our resident session ace. This month: What Was It Like In The Olden Days, Grandad?
When The Beatles recorded Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (November 1966-April 1967) it was, as any fule kno, a groundbreaking project. The inherent brilliance of the collaboration between George Martin and The Fab Four is clearly apparent. However, the technical aspects of the production itself and the innovations of engineers Geof Emerick and Ken Townsend are of major importance in themselves. Fortunately for our Parlophone Pioneers, time and financial constraints were notable by their absence. Which is just as well. Because back then, if you wished to ‘cut a record’, you would need to pass through the hallowed portals of a studio complex such as EMI Abbey Road, cheque book in hand. In modern day terms, the equivalent of a four-figure sum per day would have gained you access to Studio 2. For six months. Then there would be the engineer’s fees plus those for assistants (‘tape ops’), the reels of tape, hire fees for instruments and outboard gear, piano tuning. In this case there would also have been the cost of employing an orchestra, brass section and individual session musicians as required. Aside from anything else, the studios and record companies that paid ‘em out of the artist’s future royalties acted effectively as gatekeepers to the industry. Put baldly, if you weren’t a signed artist, you didn’t get to make records.
Of course one can retrace one’s studio steps even further back to the primordial swamp of early popular music, when the engineers wore white lab coats and recorded in two-track stereo. Minstrels and troubadours were expressly forbidden from entering the holy of holies itself - the control room. By the time our beat combo heroes had stopped touring to concentrate on their experimental ‘concept album’, hey still had but four tracks to play with. The eight-track machine was only to reach commercial application later that year. The solution was to employ the technique of track reduction - four tracks mixed down to one, freeing a further three for more recording. And repeated as required. In retrospect, the painstaking effort expended and the time involved in achieving the desired results beggar belief. Later during the Sergeant Pepper recordings, two machines were linked using a 50Hz control signal. In this way George Martin could sync the band’s mix while recording an orchestra on the second machine. We can see in hindsight that the now-taken-for-granted concept of multi-track recording was being born, even if it was as clunky as a worn seatbel
