professional 4-tracking - how did they do it?

[Muckelroy]

I understand that most of the 60's stuff from the Beatles was done with 4-track machines. I've HEARD, or seen, or read, whatever........that many of the Beatles's albums, forgive me for not remembering which ones, have been remixed using original 4-track work tapes, which have each individual instrument on its own track. I think that due to the inability to accurately sync 5 tape machines together and play them all back, they bounced each set of tracks to one track of the master 4-track tape, and vaulted away that particular work tape. now, is this true? Or are these modern re-mixes just vamped up versions of the master 4-track tape?

That being said, I can only imagine how immensly complicated the tracking process must have been. I know they had 2 4-track machines, and I believe they recorded a set of instruments, say, drums, on 4 tracks of the left machine. They would then mix this all together, and bounce it to say, track 1 of the 4-track tape machine on the right hand side. Then, it seems that they'd vault that drum tape away, and put a fresh one on for the guitar/keyboard tracks. What boggles my mind is how they managed to manually/mechanically sync these two tapes up together. for the bouncing process.

If I had to do such a thing, and I had two identical, equally maintained machines, I'd measure off about 2 feet of tape from the head of the tape, and mark that precise spot that sits on the repro-head with a grease pencil. I'd do the same for both tapes, so that they have an equally-spooled, equally marked starting point. Anytime I'd do a bounce from the left multitrack tape, to the right master 4-track tape, I guess I'd just wind the reels to that precice point, so that the mark sits on the repro head of both tapes, and activate both transports at the same time. Is this what ol' George Martin had to do? Or did he just bounce back and forth from BOTH machines, so that mechanical synchronizing wasn't necessary? Or am I completely off?

-callie-

P.S. a brief edit.

There could be only one logical explanation for having 2 4-track tape machines, instead of just one. And I think that above method is WHY they had two. Otherwise, you'd run out of tracks REAL QUICK, and if you couldn't manually sync the two machines together, at some point, you'd be stuck with just one tape machine. So that's why I think that's how they bounced their stuff. Once again, smack me if I'm wrong.

 

[BRDTS]

Yeah...multiple machines and sync is one of my favorite subjects since I come from the days when there were never enough tracks and things were so frustrating to work with.

For Beatles....yes, two non-synchronized four tracks and bouncing back and forth between machines. Before they had those two, there were two 2-tracks only...up until late 62 or something....the Beatles Sessions book by Lewsisohn is a great resource for seeing how the track sheets layed out and the submix forumulas used....irritatingly so because they had to stop what they were doing (constantly) and wait for a submix...."Penny Lane" alone is a 40 track song once you count up the individual tracks on all the 1" reels.

The saving grace of what had to happen in those old days (in my opinion) is that all the reels were saved....nothing was erased. Because of that, eventually...beginning in the 90's, EMI was able to transfer all the individual mono tracks from the reels (not the submixes) to Protools so that each track could be moved around, realigned, cleaned up, and remixed..........hence the beautiful various new stereo mixes that have been trickling out of Abbey Road over the past decade on the various anthologies (dvd etc).

There was a huge chunk of stuff remixed for surround also...which George (before he died) Paul, Ringo, and Yoko listened to and approved....the little that's been released is beautiful stuff although I don't think the bulk of it will be released in my lifetime. There's so much money to be made by EMI parceling this stuff out over future decades.

But anyway....the prisitine 1" reels of all those mono tracks being preserved....and transferred into today's incredible daws....is (to me) a very very lucky thing for all of us who study engineering...or who just love music. Those 1" reels could've easily been erased and trashed as has happened to lots of old recordings.

I used to follow this 4 track topic back when the Beatles were top 10 current stuff because I was also a budding engineer in those days and wanted to know how they did it. I figured it out way back then because ...it's the way everyone built tracks. Fill up 4 tracks...submix to one or 2 on the 2nd four tracks...fill 3 tracks on the 2nd machine....submix back to a track of the first machine (with the tape ff up to where it was blank). Etc Etc. I adopted the same approach in the old days, saving all the reels. I eventually began transferring everything to Nuendo a few years back and I'm so glad I kept the reels.

From a working standpoint, those were horribly frustrating days. But when you look back on the bulk of work put out by everyone by the mid 60's.....everybody was doing the bounce to bounce thing. It was just sort of a fact of life.

Get the Lewisohn book. It'll make you appreciate how easy we have it now. I'm glad I grew up in the biz when I did....but I absolutely love the technology now. You take the knowledge gained from the old days, and plug in the technology we have now, and it's absolute heaven to work with music now.

 

[Muckelroy]

OH, so, they'd fill up a tape, bounce it to 1 track of the next machine.

Then, they'd fill up the other three tracks of THAT tape, and bounce it to one track of the the fast-forwarded blank part of the previous tape? Then, rinse, wash, repeat?

That's frikin' awesome. Logically, it makes so much sense, to work that way, because you can bounce as you go, you don't have to worry about manually synchronizing stuff, and you have all of your original tracks preserved.

But in practice, musta been a HUGE PITA!!!

But it'll be fun to do a session that way some time or another, just for s's and g's.

-callie-

 

[Muckelroy]

Come to think of it, it would be rather diffucult to work that way with, say, a single 8 track, or even 2 8-track machines. The noise build-up would just be too gawd-aweful to even think of making useable bounces, but, you know.

Anybody here do sessions like that? maybe, 2 Tascam 34's?

 

[BRDTS]

The noise was a tremendous problem even on 4 track. There are 3 or four pages in a row in the Lewisohn book where there was great concern coming up as some songs progressed. They'd be into a song that wasn't done and there'd be so much noise...and the other problem such as an organ that was recorded about five reels ago is now so "submixed" in that they couldn't even hear it anymore. Which led to all kinds of crummy procedures like having to wait to put on critical instruments till last....namely in a lot of cases...bass guitar. I don't know about anyone else, but it would be real frustrating to spend a bunch of time working on a song that for most of the sessions...had no bass guitar on it.

Using bass guitar as an example...you can even check out the Youtube video of the film of the Beatles getting ready to record the first basic tracks of "Hey Jude". By that time, they sortof knew what would get buried in the course of overdubs. They had a ton of overdubs that were going to be happening on "Hey Jude", so you can see the film as an example of how they had to operate.

Despite the film being the run throughs, that's exactly the way they would've been hearing things when starting the actual 1st few tracks....no bass.

 

[The Ghost of FM]

Anybody here do sessions like that? maybe, 2 Tascam 34's?

Many years ago, I did a concept album project with my buddy, Doug. He had a very rare Sony 4 track reel to reel and I had a TEAC A3340S, we used dbx 224X noise reduction units to keep things quiet along with judicial use of gates and we were amazed at the quality we achieved with that method of filling up one machine and then bouncing in stereo to the next deck and adding two more tracks as we built up the songs. We also did a 4 track stereo master so that one song could blend into the next one while keeping each finished song separate for future purposes.

A pain in the ass perhaps, but, at the time, we loved the process and the results.

Cheers!

 

[BRDTS]

As a Tascam dealer in the olden days, I would sell a few dual 80-8's to customers. 16-track machines were a magnitude higher in price than even two 80-8's at 3k each, so I would demo filling one machine's tracks, mixing through a tandem set of Model 5's (which were a big add-on-complete-studio type sale back there for a while) into one or two tracks of the 2nd 80-8 machine and then back and forth as discussed.

It was easy to pitch that in 1977 because those of us already around the biz knew the technique well and it was a way to get a bunch of tracks into guys hands at a relatively reasonable cost.

We would also go another route of selling mixdown machines (25-2 was big) and teaching the guys how to mix down the first 8 tracks to 1 or 2 tracks of the 25-2...and then play that back into a track on a blank part of the reel of 80-8 tape...overdub 7 tracks ...mix to the 25-2 etc. This was far more cumbersome, took extra passes of bouncing...but it did preserve tracks for anyone interested in having access to the separate tracks "at some future time". Which would be right about now.

 

[Dr ZEE]

we loved the process and the results.

Cheers!

WORD!

and the grey-haired guys who keep saying and writing that recording was hell-on-earth in "the old days" should of been doing something else instead. Also those guys hated their job then and so they do hate it today (if they still have that job, of course or even still alive )

btw, getting up and draggin' your a$$ out of the bed in the morning is pain in the A$$ too from time to time (for some guys it's so all the time ) , but the alternative is? - stop waking up

/later

 

[BRDTS]

....."that recording was hell-on-earth in "the old days" should of been doing something else instead....."
----------------------------------------------------
Actually, nobody thought it was hell-on-earth at the time because there was no reference to anything else.

Things are so cool now with the tools we have ...but no doubt this will be known as a hell-on-earth time for a lot of people once we get another ten years out and have access to 32+core pcs, virtual 3d monitoring and who knows what else.

 

[Dr ZEE]

Things are so cool now.

not as cool as they used to be. not even close.

..access to 32+core pcs, virtual 3d monitoring....and who knows what else.

Access to actual Hell? Maybe? I can see it's comming

 

[lexridge]

As BRDTS said, get the Lewisohn book. It's called the Beatles Recording Sessions . http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/05...2586/ref=pd_bbs_3/103-5712045-3298251?ie=UTF8

Also, something that should be noted here, is the Beatles recorded everything for MONO. It was quite a task for George Martin to create stereo mixes from what was originally meant to be MONO, and the Beatles were never present during stereo mixdowns. If you have access to the stereo and mono mixes of the same albums, they are quite different. True Beatles fans usually have both mixes.

This is also why the first four British CDs are only available in MONO. The first two albums, Please Please Me, and With the Beatles were actually recorded on 2 track. One track for the instrumentation, the other for the vocals. The reverbed vocals on the instrument track was simply created while downmixing a stereo master.

If you really want to hear some tremendious stereo mixes of the early stuff, find the "Studio Sessions at Abbey Road" bootleg set. It is absolutely incredible, and every take of many songs are there, including breakdowns. They are LIVE recordings that sound spectacular! It is a four disc set.

Because of Abbey Road's technique of using dual 4 tracks, and manually syncing them with a human thumb, they actually created the flanging effect, which the Beatles actually used on many recording, especially Sgt. Pepper.

I too am big time into recording, and the Beatles are largely responsible. I read George Martin's book "All You Need is Ears" when I was 12 years old, and was hooked on recording ever since. In fact, the first probably 35 songs I learned to play on my cheap-ass guitar (at the time) were Beatles songs.

Fun topic......thanks!

 

[lexridge]

Oh, and BTW, Let it Be and Abbey Road were both recorded on shitty 8 track machines. The hiss on those two albums is far worse than any of the 4 track stuff.

 

[cjacek]

Fascinating thread!

I used to experiment, perhaps not as extensively as it was done back in the "olden days", with two 4 track machines and, despite the perceived difficulty and frustration by some, it was so much fun! I actually appreciated the constraints of working this way. I learned a lot and truth be told, I would have not minded if technology hadn't progressed past analog 4 tracks. It's a cool way to record, I think.

 

[Dr ZEE]

shitty 8 track machines..

heh heh heh ... yeah, shtty shitty shitty .... thanks God, there no mo' such shit surrounding us. we are free of shitty crap now... like birds, of course

 

[Dr ZEE]

arhhhhhhh, this is another book ... lots of photos of shitty sessions and uncool gear.

 

[cjacek]

arhhhhhhh, this is another book ... lots of photos of shitty sessions and uncool gear.

In fact, the book is so "uncool" that I just pre-ordered it, the deluxe version for $110!!

Can't wait to receive it!!

Btw, thanks for the heads up, Doc!

 

[cjacek]

Btw, just to be super clear:

RECORDING THE BEATLES

 

[SteveMac]

arhhhhhhh, this is another book ... lots of photos of shitty sessions and uncool gear.

What the hell, it finally came out.
110 bucks?? ! .

 

[cjacek]

What the hell, it finally came out.
110 bucks?? ! .

Frankly I consider it rather inexpensive for what it is and promises to be.

 

[cjacek]

Btw: I think the book will be the best audio engineering class ever offered, all for $110!