All You Need Is Ears
A great book is George Martins "All You Need Is Ears".
It's funny as hell, and it does get into some of the stuff the Beatles were doing, and it goes into how they did things way back when.
I have always wondered about that era. I know that Studios Mixers tended to be built by the actual engineer (He was an Electrc Engineer back then, and actually built much of the studio's equipment, and did repairs and modifications-so, if the studio had somebody who was a genius-they got better recordings.
I mean, listen to the Motown recordings- The Drumkits were kicking ass, while most of the ret of the recorded drumsounds sucked.
Sorry, but Ringo's drumsounds just can't compete with any of the Motown stuff. On the other hand, George Martin, was doing some heavy duty editing and bouncing back then.
I personally have gotten to record/mix in a Studio that was built back in the late 1960's; it started out as a 4 track-and it was eventually converted to 24 track, and when they went to 24 track-they just built more channels for the mixer! Each Channel of the Mixer is a 3 band Parametric E.Q. with a Tube mic pre-amp (Yes-24 channels of Tube Preamps!) then they each go into a switching box, to direct the inputs to the outputs via lighted pushbuttons.
The Studio owner built the mixer himself.
It was kind of cool-and the 1 recording room (no booths) is about 50' x 100' (This 1 room is bigger than my whole house!) and it has a 25' Ceiling.
You should have seen this guy shit a brick, when my brother turned his two V4's up full blast! BWAHAHA!!
We stuck a Baffle in the middle of the room, and an RE20 on each side facing away from it-and a pair of Ampeg 4x12"'s at each end of the room, and my Brother went for it full blast!
They Guy's kid loved it , but I thought he was gonna have a heart attack! hahaha
Tim