I didn't really have a point, and I also didn't articulate what I wanted to say very well. I'm not even sure what my point is, so I shouldn't have said that Dr. Spring missed my point, because, to be honest "I" don't really even get my point. Sometimes I have verbal diarrhea and just spew forth before really thinking it out.
I thought you articulated your point well and I caught your point. I both agree and disagree with it, but only because there's a wide scope of drum sounds
within a mix on records spanning 1960 to 1970. A lot of the drums on a wide variety of records across a number of genres
wouldn't cut it even by the mid 70s. Some barely cut it on the records they were on in the 60s ! And it wasn't only the drums.
It occurs to me that there were two main reasons for that, aside from the technology.
Firstly, it was new and evolving. Engineers moved from recording entire outfits with one microphone to capturing performances with multiple mics and multiple
tracks. I think there was a lot of thinking in the 40s and 50s that the drums were important to
the artist but not the overall sound. After all,
the artist was the one that the record label was pushing on the public, not the drummer. Often, the drummer was thought of as the timekeeper rather than an important musical element. So as long as the recording
artist and band could hear the drums and stay in time, all was deemed OK. Also, dare I say it, many producers and engineers on both sides of the Atlantic simply didn't like or understand rock'n'roll and that spilled over into how some of them recorded those that made the records.
Secondly, the emphasis was the opposite to the way things turned after the Beatles. Bands eventually got together because they wanted to be "recording
artists" and have hit records which was not the way many of the singers and bands began. Most began as
performers. And as most of us know, performing on stage or in a room or hall is very different from recording. You just hear it so differently. These
artists had to learn a whole new craft when it came to making records. It must have come as a shock to many of them to hear themselves recorded for the first few times. Learning how to translate their
live sound onto recordings that could be played on record players and radios took a pretty serious leap of imagination. It's no coincidence or surprise to me that band members started to take more of an interest in the recording and mixing process and gained far more power than they initially had. As their demands stretched engineers and resources, so various developers pushed the technology to accommodate them.
I don't think there's a young engineer from the 60s that, had you offered them digital technology at the time, would have turned it down. Digital was the outcome of all they dreamed of back then.
Many of them just happened to fall in love with analogue along the way.