LESSON 1

History of Recording

Assignment: Read lesson 1 in your workbook Answer the questions on the Quiz found at the end of this lesson

The history of modern recording began in Thomas Edison’s laboratory in the late 1800’s with his experiments involving mechanical recording on wax and tin foil cylinders. Edison figured out that by capturing sound with a mechanical diaphragm and transferring that energy to a stylus he could make an imprint in a rotating drum of tin foil. When the imprint was turned again with a pickup stylus on it, the indentations in the tin foil would move the stylus, which would be connected to a diaphragm (or speaker) and the result would be sound waves.

Recording session in the 1920’s. Note the horn that is being used to pick up the sound.

Oddly enough, this is still the same basic formula we still use today. Capturing sound waves and changing them into an electromagnetic/digital storage medium. A transducer is a device that converts one type of energy to another. In the studio a transducer might be the microphone that is capturing energy in the form of sound waves and converting it to electrical energy, or it might be the magnetic tape heads on an analog tape machine, which converts electrical energy to electromagnetic energy which is stored on the iron oxide particles on the tape itself.

The first music to be recorded in the old mechanical systems were very poor quality. Wire recorders were soon put into service, but were still low fidelity, and the wires take up reel would often get twisted and tangled. However, with the advent of magnetic tape, the recording of music would take off on a journey of its own for the next 60 years.

Magnetic Tape

The origination of electromagnetic tape begins with a German engineer named Fritz Pfleumer. While sitting in a coffee shop in Paris in 1927, he thought of coating paper tape with iron oxide to produce a pliable magnetic surface to record on. His German patent for "sounding paper" was granted in 1928, but his tape recorder tore up the paper tape and was only used to demonstrate the potential of tape for editing and reuse. After more work, Pfleumer signed a deal with a company called AEG on Nov. 28, 1932, to develop a recorder for his tape based system A magnetic tape recording system works by moving a tape made of Mylar and coated with Iron oxide particles across a series of electromagnetic heads. The record head will convert an electrical sound wave signal into a + and - electromagnetic field. The field generated by the heads will continuously print a magnet portrait on the tape as it moves along. If the tape is played back, the playback head will pick up the magnetic field printed on the iron oxide particles and turn that magnetic energy back into an electrical sound signal. The erase head works during the recording phase and applies a random magnetic field to the tape to neutralize and delete the previous recording.

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Shortly after Pfleumer’s first tape recorder, analog tape became the main recording medium in the recording of music up until the early 21st century. The music industry demanded constant innovations in analog tape machines including the development of the first multitrack tape machine. The first development in multi-tracking was stereo sound, which divided the recording head into two tracks. First developed by German audio engineers ca. 1943, 2-track recording was rapidly adopted for modern music in the 1950s because it enabled signals from two or more separate microphones to be recorded simultaneously, enabling stereophonic recordings to be made and edited conveniently.

Multitrack Tape

Guitarist and technician Les Paul soon started to experiment with these machines using the 2 record heads separately. He would record a musical performance on one head, and then play it back while recording another instrument along side and in time with the first track. Overdubbing was thus invented, and these experiments led him to order the first custom-built eight-track recorder from Ampex.

With this recorder, Les Paul and his wife Mary Ford would produce the very first multi track recordings ever. The Ampex Corporation jumped on board multitrack recording and by 1955, Ampex had produced the first commercial multitrack tape recorder. Using a process Ampex called "Sel-Sync" (for Selective Synchronous Recording), the performer could record on one track while listening back to previously recorded tracks, and they would all be synchronized.

The first production machine produced by Ampex was a 3 track recorder and was soon a big hit with music producers all over the country. Engineers would often record backing music in stereo on the first two tracks, and save the 3rd track for the lead vocalist, who would the have the ability to “punch-in”, or re-record certain lines or phrases. This would give the artist and producer much more flexibility when recording lead vocals. However, the need for greater flexibility grew quickly and Ampex, as well as other tape machine manufactures, started production on 4 track machines. 4 track machines were the staple through the 60’s with groups like the Beatles and The Beach Boys pushing the artistic potential of multitrack tape with the use of “bouncing”, in which several trackes would be mixed down or, “bounced” to an open track.

This allowed the other tracks to be freed up for new performances. Bouncing would slightly degrade the signal, but the open tracks would be far more valuable than the slight signal degradation.

Ampex 300 3 Track

Producers such as Phil Spector utilized this technique to create extremely layered recordings and invented the “Wall of Sound” technique which involved multiple players doing multiple takes and blended with a unique use of reverb. Eventually though, tape machine manufacturers started increasing the number of tracks and tape sizes on their machines, including 1 inch 8 Track, 1 inch 16 track, 2 inch 16 Track, and the standard for the last 25 years, 2 inch 24 Track.

Multitrack Digital Tape

In the early 1980’s digital recording began to peak the interest of the music industry with a promise of recordings an almost non existent noise floor and no signal loss. There were a few good Digital tape machines that were produced in the 1980’s. Early machines, while providing good signal to noise ratio, were grainy sounding and were not usually favored over the smoothness of analog. 3M made some machines that utilized a 1/4" inch 32 track system and found itself in some big studios, however 2 inch 24 track still held on as the standard format for almost all big recording studios. but the big wave of digital recording came in the 1995 when several consumer priced Digital tape machines were put on the market. Alesis introduced a modular digital 8 track that utilized a Super VHS tape format, and soon after that Tascam came out with a machine that used Hi 8mm tapes. Both machine sold very well in the consumer markets and created a bridge between the big studios, and a musicians home studio. Musicians could now record at home on a format that offered the same sound quality as the studio they might work at, so in effect they could record some of their own takes and bring the tape to the studio and integrate it into a recording they had been working on at the studio. Tascam’s DA88’s were much more reliable and found their way into the bigger studios. The Alesis ADATS were based off of a VHS based format that was much more prone to jamming, but were much cheaper than the DA88’s and were embraced by the consumer market.

Alesis ADAT 1992

2 Track Digital Tape

Digital Audio Tape (DAT or R-DAT) is a signal recording and playback medium developed by Sony and introduced in 1987.In appearance it is similar to a compact audio cassette, using 4 mm magnetic tape enclosed in a protective shell, but is roughly half the size at 73 mm × 54 mm × 10.5 mm. As the name suggests, the recording is digital rather than analog. DAT has the ability to record at higher, equal or lower sampling rates than a CD (48, 44.1 or 32 kHz sampling rate respectively) at 16 bits quantization. If a digital source is copied then the DAT will produce an exact clone, unlike other digital media such as Digital Compact Cassette or non-Hi-MD MiniDisc, both of which use lossy data compression. Like most formats of videocassette, a DAT cassette may only be recorded and played in one direction, unlike an analog compact audio cassette.

Although intended as a replacement for audio cassettes, the format was never widely adopted by consumers because of issues of expense and concerns about unauthorized digital quality copies. The format saw moderate success in professional markets and as a computer storage medium. As Sony has ceased production of new recorders, it will become more difficult to play archived recordings in this format unless they are copied to other formats or hard drives.

DAW’s At the same time tape based digital formats were being developed, so was the computer based technology in the form of DAW’s, or Digital Audio Workstation’s. The term DAW refers to a tapeless computer based system that uses hard drives as the storage medium, and allows the sound clips to be freely manipulated similarly to today’s modern computer based systems. Early models of DAW’s included New England Digitals Synclavier, and Fairlight.

� Synclavier Recording System 1989

These systems were very expensive, usually in the range of $100,000 to $200,000. Even though they were designed and built in the late 70’s and 80’s, they still surpass many modern systems in terms of processing power and sampling rate. Most of these systems found their way into the hands of arrangers, film score producers, and foley and dialog engineers, due to the ease of editing, but still never replaced 2 inch analog tape in the studio as the main medium for recording music.

The Quest for Hard Drive Space for Consumers

DAW’s for the most part stayed out of the studios hands for multitrack recording due to the limitations and cost of hard drive space and processing power. Hard drives built in the mid to late 80’s were still only able to hold about 100 MB’s of information and a multitrack DAW requires about 1GB of hard drive space to track a full 24 track song. Eventually, hard drive and processor technology would catch up with the demands of digital audio, and by the early 1990’s consumers could purchase hard drives sufficient to do full multitrack recording on their own personal computer.

Digidesign (Avid) and Pro Tools

Digidesign is not the first, but by far the most popular DAW systems to grab hold in the music industry. It is considered the standard in almost any major studio around, and has also found its way into the consumer studio, again making a bridge between a musicians home setup, and the pro studio. Pro Tools was developed by UC Berkeley graduates Peter Gotcher and Evan Brooks. Both were double majors in electrical engineering and computer science at Berkeley. The first incarnation of Pro Tools started life in 1984 as Sound Designer, while the pair were creating and selling drum sound chips under their Digidrums label. Sound Designer was originally designed to edit sounds for the E-MU Emulator sampling keyboard. Gotcher and Brooks discussed with E-MU Systems the possibility of integrating their renamed 'Sound Tools' software into the Emulator III keyboard released in 1987. E-MU rejected this offer and Gotcher and Brooks started Digidesign. By 1989 Digidesign had their Sound Tools software on the market using Apple Macintosh platform and branded it as the first “tapeless studio” In 1991, Digidesign changed the name of their software to Pro Tools, and thus began the long line of Digidesign/Pro Tools innovations over the next 20 years.

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Logic

Logic is another DAW software that is worth mentioning. Logic Pro is a hybrid 32 / 64 bit digital audio workstation and MIDI sequencer software application for the Mac OS X platform. Originally created by German software developer Emagic, Logic Pro became an Apple product when Apple bought Emagic in 2002. Logic Pro is part of Apple's Logic Studio bundle of professional music applications.A consumer-level version based on the same interface and audio engine but with reduced features, called Logic Express, is also available at a reduced cost. Apple's Garage Band, another application using Logic’s audio engine, is bundled in iLife, a suite of software which comes included on any new Macintosh computer.

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Hard Disk Recording

There are more ways to record digitally now days other than through a computer based DAW. There are several companies that make “direct to disk” hard disk recorders. They offer the advantage of being simple to use and somewhat portable, while giving up all the editing features of a system like Pro Tools or Logic. Hard disk recorders more resemble digital tape as it is just a multitrack recorder.

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Alesis HD24 Hard Disk Recorder

Lesson 1 History of Recording

Quiz 1. Thomas Edison pioneered recording by capturing sound with a mechanical diaphragm which in turn would make an imprint on a rotating drum of tin foil.

2. The first electro magnetic tape was made of paper coated with iron oxide.

3. The record head on a magnetic tape machine uses an electro magnetic field to print + and - sound waves on the iron oxide coated tape.

4. Guitarist Les Paul was the first to experiment with multitrack tape recording.

5. The Ampex Corporation was the first company to manufacture a multitrack tape machine that was available to the public.

6. Bouncing is the process of mixing down several recorded tracks to an open track so that those tracks can be recorded on again.

7. Producer Phil Spector used a technique of adding multiple layers of overdubs to create a Wall of Sound effect.

8. The ADAT machine was one of the first Digital Tape machines to make it to the consumer market, and used the same transport as a Super VHS machine.

9. Synclavier and Fairlight are examples of early DAW’s.

10. Pro Tools is considered the industry standard for DAW systems in todays industry.