Recording studio as an instrument

The use of recording studios as musical instruments or tools of composition began in the early to mid 20th-century, as composers started exploiting the newfound potentials of multitrack recording. Before the late 1940s, musical recordings were created with the idea of presenting a faithful rendition of a real-life performance. These changes accelerated in the mid 1950s, and by the early 1970s, the "additive approach to recording" would be very common in rock music. As of the 2010s, the idea remains ubiquitous in genres such as hip-hop, electronic music, and pop. The practice is sometimes described as "playing the studio".

Background

Further information: Recording studio and Sound recording and reproduction

File:MFQ with Phil Spector.jpg

Phil Spector (center) at Gold Star Studios, where he developed his Wall of Sound methods, 1966

Before the late 1940s, musical recordings were created with the idea of presenting a faithful rendition of a real-life performance. Initially, the practice of "studio as compositional tool" was evident mainly in the realms of pop music, as only a minuscule number of classical composers took to this form of music-making. Popular recording conventions changed profoundly in the mid 1950s as new possibilities were opened by three-track tape. In the early 1960s, it was common for producers, songwriters, and engineers to freely experiment with musical form, orchestration, unnatural reverb, and other sound effects. Some of the best known examples are Phil Spector's Wall of Sound and Joe Meek's use of homemade electronic sound effects for acts like the Tornados. In this time, a "gulf" would exist between experimental composers and "out-there" pop musicians, partly due to the role of the recording studio. Regarding this, composer Robert Ashley is quoted in 1966; "We can't be popular musicians, where the fairly exciting things happen. [...] The one thing I like about popular music is that they record it. They record it, record it, record it, record it! The astute producer cuts out the magic from the different tapes (laughter) and puts them in a certain order and gets a whole piece. It's very beautiful, because it's really aural magic. [...] We have to invent social situations to allow that magic to happen."

Pioneers

During the 1940s, French composers Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry were developing musique concrete, a method of composition in which pieces of tape are rearranged and spliced together, which became the origin of sampling. Meanwhile in England, Daphne Oram experimented heavily with electronic instruments during her tenure as a balancing engineer for the BBC. Written in 1949, Still Point is a 30-minute piece that combined pre-recorded acoustic orchestration with live electronic manipulation—one of the first ever to do so. However, Ophram's tape experiments were mostly unheard at the time. In 1957, she said recorded sounds were "a sort of modern magic. We think there’s something in it. Some musicians believe it may become an art form in its own right." Other pioneers from the 1940s include Bill Putnam, Les Paul, and Tom Dowd, who contributed to the development of common recording practices like reverb, tape delay, and overdubbing. Putnam was one of the first to recognize echo and reverb as elements to enhance a recording, rather than as natural byproducts of the recording space. He engineered the Harmonicats' 1947 novelty song "Peg o' My Heart", which not only was a huge hit, but also became the first popular recording to use artificial reverb for artistic effect.

Abbey Road Studio Two, where most Beatles tracks were recorded

English producer Joe Meek is considered one of the most influential engineers of all time, being one of the first to exploit the use of recording studios as instruments, and one of the first producers to assert an individual identity as an artist. Phil Spector, his American counterpart, is also considered "important as the first star producer of popular music and its first 'auteur' ... Spector changed pop music from a performing art ... to an art which could sometimes exist only in the recording studio". Another early auteur of popular music was the Beach Boys' multi-tasking leader Brian Wilson, who himself was mentored by Spector. He was the first rock producer to use the studio as a discrete instrument. Wilson and the Beatles' producer George Martin are generally credited with helping to popularize the idea of the recording studio as a musical instrument which could then be used to aid the process of composition, with music producers after the mid 1960s increasingly drawing from their influence.

Brian Eno, who launched his career in the 1970s as synthesizer player for Roxy Music, is frequently referred to as one of popular music's most influential artists. Critic Jason Ankeny at AllMusic argues that Eno "forever altered the ways in which music is approached, composed, performed, and perceived, and everything from punk to techno to new age bears his unmistakable influence." His production style has proven influential in several general respects: "his recording techniques have helped change the way that modern musicians – particularly electronic musicians – view the studio. No longer is it just a passive medium through which they communicate their ideas but itself a new instrument with seemingly endless possibilities." According to the book Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound

Eno has singled out a number of musicians whom he feels consciously sought to realize the potential of that grand new musical instrument – the recording studio: Glenn Gould (whose technique of recording many performances and editing them together Eno greatly admired), Jimi Hendrix (who would fill as many as twenty-six separate tracks on a thirty-two-track tape recorder with guitar solos, and then begin the real creative process of blending, mixing, and deleting), Phil Spector (who “understood better than anybody that a recording could do things that could never actually happen”), the Beach Boys, the Jefferson Airplane, and the Byrds (whose experimental and psychedelic approach Eno appreciated), the Beatles (whose 1966 album Revolver, recorded on four-track with George Martin at the controls, Eno described as “my favourite Beatles album”), and Simon and Garfunkel (“The song ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ [1970] is perfection in its way. I’m told it took 370 hours of studio time to record – that’s longer than most albums, but it is such an incredible tour de force.

See also

• Recording consciousness
• "Good Vibrations" (The Beach Boys, 1966) – credited as a milestone in the development of rock music and a prime proponent in revolutionizing rock music from live concert performances to studio productions which could only exist on record. Musicologist Charlie Gillett called it "one of the first records to flaunt studio production as a quality in its own right, rather than as a means of presenting a performance".
• Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (The Beatles, 1967) – according to author Olivier Julien, Sgt. Pepper represents the "epitome of the transformation of the recording studio into a compositional tool", marking the moment when "popular music entered the era of phonographic composition." Its lasting commercial success and critical impact are largely due to Martin and his engineers' creative use of studio equipment while originating new processes.

References

Notes

Citations

Bibliography

• Ashby, Arved Mark, ed. (2004). The Pleasure of Modernist Music: Listening, Meaning, Intention, Ideology. Boydell & Brewer. ISBN 978-1-58046-143-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Bannister, Matthew (2007). White Boys, White Noise: Masculinities and 1980s Indie Guitar Rock. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. ISBN 978-0-7546-8803-7. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Blake, Andrew (2009). "Recording practices and the role of the producer". In Cook, Nicholas; Clarke, Eric; Leech-Wilkinson, Daniel (eds.). The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-139-82796-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Cogan, Jim; Clark, William (2003). Temples of Sound: Inside the Great Recording Studios. Chronicle Books. ISBN 978-0-8118-3394-3. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Edmondson, Jacqueline, ed. (2013). Music in American Life: An Encyclopedia of the Songs, Styles, Stars, and Stories that Shaped our Culture. ABC-CLIO. ISBN 978-0-313-39348-8. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Eno, Brian (2004). "The Studio as Compositional Tool" (PDF). In Cox, Christoph; Warner, Daniel (eds.). Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. A&C Black. ISBN 978-0-8264-1615-5. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Gillett, Charlie (1984). The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll. Perseus Books Group. ISBN 978-0-306-80683-4. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Grubbs, David (2014). Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording. Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-8223-7710-8. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Hannan, Michael (2008). "The sound design of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band". In Julien, Olivier (ed.). Sgt. Pepper and the Beatles: It Was Forty Years Ago Today. Ashgate. ISBN 978-0-7546-6708-7. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Julien, Oliver (2008). "'A lucky man who made the grade': Sgt. Pepper and the rise of a phonographic tradition in twentieth-century popular music". In Julien, Olivier (ed.). Sgt. Pepper and the Beatles: It Was Forty Years Ago Today. Ashgate. ISBN 978-0-7546-6708-7. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Martin, Bill (2015). Avant Rock: Experimental Music from the Beatles to Bjork. Open Court Publishing Company. ISBN 978-0-8126-9939-5. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Stuessy, Joe; Lipscomb, Scott David (2009). Rock and Roll: Its History and Stylistic Development. Prentice Hall Higher Education. ISBN 978-0-13-601068-5. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Tamm, Eric (1995). Brian Eno: His Music And The Vertical Color Of Sound (PDF). Da Capo Press. ISBN 978-0-306-80649-0. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Further reading

• Moorefield, Virgil (2010). The Producer as Composer: Shaping the Sounds of Popular Music – Virgil Moorefield – Google Boeken. MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-13457-8.