old RCA desks and Elvis

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CoolCat

CoolCat

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I been reading and etc..etc..

it crossed my mind, in this world of Unlimited Everything Tracking....how did the old Elvis records sound so good?

i read they did some with one mic! and when I was at Nashville Hall of Fame they had a old RCA mono desk that Elvis recorded through....

mono...one mic....but the tunes I just heard recently sound really mixed well and all parts are heard clearly, and the vocal track is impeccable and stunning...

just wondered if anyone had any inputs to how they would go about achieving this, and being the Analog Only forum I thought to ask it here.
I'm curious how they achieved that mix, what tricks did they do back then?
 
It's easy.
Get one of the greatist singers ever, a bunch of pro musicians and backing singers, a couple of rca ribbons, a tube mixer, half inch mono tape deck. Record in a
good sounding room at resonable volume and let the singers and musicians balance themselves.
Work up the arrangments on the spot so it sounds fresh. record a few takes.
Find the sweet spots to place the mics.
Maybe dip it a bath of tape echo to taste.
Cut a master on a lathe.
Your done!
 
ZORF ...... you forgot one of the most important features!!! The Engineer !!!
 
zorf said:
It's easy.
Get one of the greatist singers ever, a bunch of pro musicians and backing singers, a couple of rca ribbons, a tube mixer, half inch mono tape deck. Record in a
good sounding room at resonable volume and let the singers and musicians balance themselves.
Work up the arrangments on the spot so it sounds fresh. record a few takes.
Find the sweet spots to place the mics.
Maybe dip it a bath of tape echo to taste.
Cut a master on a lathe.
Your done!
Click to expand...

Yeah ...sigh
 
some interesting articles. thx..the hallway echo comment was cool and would be fun to replicate...

i wonder what that console with a tube mic sounded like through the cans and I suppose they had a mono speaker in the control room, but was it high end or just some common speaker of the time to duplicate the average home or car speakers?

amazing results.
 
I think in the early days everything was custom made.
Usually a single speaker in the control room and one in the tracking room for playback for the musicians.
The speaker probably sounded way better than what most people listened to music on. Maybe a 12 with a whizzer cone, or a 12 or 15 with a horn. No having to sit "in the triangle," and no sub. And in '55 , probably no alternate speakers to compare the mix. Oh wait, no mix, just "takes"!
The gap has narrowed now, but in those days, for most folks, it would be a teeny speaker in the car for radio if you were lucky, and a small radio at home. In '55 not that many folks had a console style record player with a bigger speaker in it.
The closest the average person would get to a full range speaker would be in a movie theater where they might have a pair of altecs that might go 50hz to 15hz. But the most common higher fidelity experience was the jukebox.
By the late fifties they started to go down to a whopping 60 Hz. Whoo hoo!
No clubbing synth sub bass there.
Hard to believe now, but jukeboxes were a very exciting musical experience for the average person.

The boards in the early days were handmade. They were trying to make everything sound as clear and clean as possible, not "warm". It just so happens that the latest tech of that era, tubes and transformers, sounds so different and interesting to our modern mp3 adjusted ears. And in the mid fifties, they had only been recording on tape for a few years after cutting direct to disk before that.

The 3d quality that coolcat mentioned in the first post was imo because of everything being live in the room with all the subtle natural reflections going on. Some people also think that analog tape has a better soundstage than digital, but im not going to get into that, because that gets tedious on these forums.
 
Great topic because I just turned page 300 in the book Recording the Beatles.

I realize this isn’t Elvis but what they were doing at Abbey Road is nothing short of awesome. Abbey Road was kind of a laboratory and EMI had a huge facility at Hays which was originally the Gramophone company. There were a lot of very smart people building sound desks, amplifiers, speakers, tape recorders etc.

There were EQ boxes specially built to flatten a Neumann microphone. There was the Altec compressor and the Fairchild limiter. Leak amplifiers were everywhere. The Altec monitors weren’t great but they knew how to get a good mix on them, knowing if it sounded good there it’d sound good anywhere.

By the 50’s recording had a long history and the people in the business knew what they were doing.

EMI and Capitol records in the USA traded secrets and as you know nothing stays secret for long. I imagine word spread quickly thru the industry.

I don’t know of any connection between Abbey Road and Sun records. It’d be interesting to explore one if it exists.
 
Talent, a great engineer and a great room is 85% or more - thats why
you cant buy a 'one box solution' and walk away with a platinum album...

The equipment you can buy today is light-years better, but if you have a
mediocre room and aren't willing to take the time to LEARN and EXPERIMENT
even reasonable talent won't shine....
 
Manslick said:
Great topic because I just turned page 300 in the book Recording the Beatles.

I realize this isn’t Elvis but what they were doing at Abbey Road is nothing short of awesome. Abbey Road was kind of a laboratory and EMI had a huge facility at Hays which was originally the Gramophone company. There were a lot of very smart people building sound desks, amplifiers, speakers, tape recorders etc.

There were EQ boxes specially built to flatten a Neumann microphone. There was the Altec compressor and the Fairchild limiter. Leak amplifiers were everywhere. The Altec monitors weren’t great but they knew how to get a good mix on them, knowing if it sounded good there it’d sound good anywhere.

By the 50’s recording had a long history and the people in the business knew what they were doing.

EMI and Capitol records in the USA traded secrets and as you know nothing stays secret for long. I imagine word spread quickly thru the industry.

I don’t know of any connection between Abbey Road and Sun records. It’d be interesting to explore one if it exists.
Click to expand...



Reading that book myself.Love it.And well worth the $100 in my opinion.
 
zorf said:
It's easy.
Get one of the greatist singers ever, a bunch of pro musicians and backing singers, a couple of rca ribbons, a tube mixer, half inch mono tape deck. Record in a
good sounding room at resonable volume and let the singers and musicians balance themselves.
Work up the arrangments on the spot so it sounds fresh.
Click to expand...

A bunch of skills that unfortunately have been forgotten in this day and age due to the good old cut and past and auto tune, "Don't worry well fix it in the mix" sigh!

Cheers
Alan.
 
CoolCat said:
I been reading and etc..etc..

it crossed my mind, in this world of Unlimited Everything Tracking....how did the old Elvis records sound so good?

i read they did some with one mic! and when I was at Nashville Hall of Fame they had a old RCA mono desk that Elvis recorded through....

mono...one mic....but the tunes I just heard recently sound really mixed well and all parts are heard clearly, and the vocal track is impeccable and stunning...

just wondered if anyone had any inputs to how they would go about achieving this, and being the Analog Only forum I thought to ask it here.
I'm curious how they achieved that mix, what tricks did they do back then?
Click to expand...

Which recordings was it that you listen to?
 
The single take live recording is IT...the guantlet doesn't get any tighter than that, huh?

Les Paul put a wrinkle in it for sure with his early multitracking techniques dubbed "suicide overdubs" but boy HOWDY does it put things into perspecgive when you listen to a half-century old recording and you walk away feeling like "how far have we come, or rather how far have we or in what ways have we fallen behind?" Simplicity is a key ingredient...talent would be the paramount ingredient I think.

Cool thread.
 
thats a great link....I'll have reading material for a month!
 
SteveM said:
Which recordings was it that you listen to?
Click to expand...

this one .... but in general a lot of those earlier recordings were really amazing.
 

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Yeah,
Powerful yet somehow intimate at the same time.
Basically three guys singing and playing acoustic rock in your living room.
 
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