What the hell did they do at Abby Road studios ??

  • Thread starter Thread starter gilwe
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Also I believe that John Lennon and George Martin invented or came up with "ADT" or Automatic double tracking. I believe it was all because John Lennon didn't want to sing his vocal track twice to double it so they came up with "ADT".
And yeah I think its a little bit of everything about the place but the huge rooms dont hurt...
 
AFAIK, the Dead's "American Beauty" was the first recording done on a 16-track machine. Supposedly, when there were only 2 such machines in the US, they had one of them.
 
Abbey Road Studios
Microphone List 2003


This list is intended as a guide only, as actual microphone numbers are subject to availability.
All microphones must be booked and agreed in advance.



AEA R 84 2

AKG (Valve)
C 12 8
C 12 VR 2
C 24 2

AKG C 414 B-ULS 9
C 414 EB 6
C 414 ULS-TL2 2
C 442 4
C 451 E 2
C 451 EB 2
C 452 EB 5
C 460 B 2
CK 1 8
CK 5 8
CK 8 4
D 109 2
D 112 3
D 190E 1
D 19c 2
D 20 9
D 202 2

Beyerdynamic
M-160 1
M-201 6

Bruel & Kjaer 4003 3
4006 6
4011 10

Calrec CM 4050 Soundfield 2

Crown PZM-30 GPB 3

Electrovoice RE-15 4
RE-16 2
RE-18 1
RE-20 5
RE-55 2

Neumann (Valve) M 50 16
M 49 6
U 47/48 7
U 67 18
SM 2 2
KM 53 4
KM 54 13
KM 56 11

Neumann KM 83 2
KM 84 18
KM 86 18
KM 130 1
KM 140 4
KM 184 10
SM 69 2
TLM 103 2
TLM 170 9
TLM 50 9
U 47 FET 7
U 87 19
U 87ai 11

RCA BX-44 4

Sanken CU 41 7

Schoeps MK 2 6
MK 2S 4
MK 5 3
MK 6 6
MK 21 8
MK 41 4
CMT 54 3
CMT 540 1
CMT 541 2

Sennheiser MD 421 9
MD 441 9
MKH 20 4

Shure Beta 57 2
Beta 58 6
KSM 32 2
SM 57 5
SM 58 3
SM 7 3
SM 81 2

Sony C-38 2
ECM 150 1

STC/Coles 4021E 1
4032E 2
4038 17

Vitavox B50 2


ABBEY ROAD STUDIOS, 3 ABBEY ROAD, LONDON NW8 9AY
TEL: +44 (0) 20 7266 7000 FAX: +44 (0) 20 7266 7250
Website: www.abbeyroad.co.uk E-mail: bookings@abbeyroad.co.uk
 
"Interested !"

Sjoko made that offer last August. I doubt he's still checking up on this thread.

But Sjoko made an interesting point last August: a natural room sound in a good room is better than a sound in a small, dead room that you add 'space' to later. I believe him.

If that's the case, then the best studio in the world would be a complex of different size rooms - all sonically attractive spaces, but different sizes so that you could get different sounds. You know, we all know the principle of picking the right mic for the right job, but imagine if you had different rooms to choose from... Instead of putting different verbs on a track, you'd just record it in a different room.
 
LemonTree said:
Abbey Road Studios
Microphone List 2003


This list is intended as a guide only, as actual microphone numbers are subject to availability.
All microphones must be booked and agreed in advance.



AEA R 84 2

AKG (Valve)
C 12 8
C 12 VR 2
C 24 2

AKG C 414 B-ULS 9
C 414 EB 6
C 414 ULS-TL2 2
C 442 4
C 451 E 2
C 451 EB 2
C 452 EB 5
C 460 B 2
CK 1 8
CK 5 8
CK 8 4
D 109 2
D 112 3
D 190E 1
D 19c 2
D 20 9
D 202 2

Beyerdynamic
M-160 1
M-201 6

Bruel & Kjaer 4003 3
4006 6
4011 10

Calrec CM 4050 Soundfield 2

Crown PZM-30 GPB 3

Electrovoice RE-15 4
RE-16 2
RE-18 1
RE-20 5
RE-55 2

Neumann (Valve) M 50 16
M 49 6
U 47/48 7
U 67 18
SM 2 2
KM 53 4
KM 54 13
KM 56 11

Neumann KM 83 2
KM 84 18
KM 86 18
KM 130 1
KM 140 4
KM 184 10
SM 69 2
TLM 103 2
TLM 170 9
TLM 50 9
U 47 FET 7
U 87 19
U 87ai 11

RCA BX-44 4

Sanken CU 41 7

Schoeps MK 2 6
MK 2S 4
MK 5 3
MK 6 6
MK 21 8
MK 41 4
CMT 54 3
CMT 540 1
CMT 541 2

Sennheiser MD 421 9
MD 441 9
MKH 20 4

Shure Beta 57 2
Beta 58 6
KSM 32 2
SM 57 5
SM 58 3
SM 7 3
SM 81 2

Sony C-38 2
ECM 150 1

STC/Coles 4021E 1
4032E 2
4038 17

Vitavox B50 2


ABBEY ROAD STUDIOS, 3 ABBEY ROAD, LONDON NW8 9AY
TEL: +44 (0) 20 7266 7000 FAX: +44 (0) 20 7266 7250
Website: www.abbeyroad.co.uk E-mail: bookings@abbeyroad.co.uk
Click to expand...

So what do I do if I want a Studio Projects C1?? :D :D
 
The guy who invented ADT was an Abbey Road engineer named Ken Townshend.

Ringo invented the internet. :)
 
ooops, sorry guys, I'be been a "bit busy" and didn't see that message.
For obvious reasons I can't post things I do for record companies, but I've got a couple of private projects on broadjam.
http://www.broadjam.com

You could look up a band called Gugga Qwan, and listen to a song called "Sustain" for instance.
And then there are a couple of Uru's songs on there as well, for sonics, listen to the song "If love had a name" which we recently recorded for a TV show.

The interesting thing might be that the amount of processing on Qwan's record, and on Uru's song If love had a name, is very minimal. This according to a principle I really believe in - record it the way you want it to sound in the first place.

A "special feature" of our studio is its drum area, which is a floating platform with huge traps for low frequencies, broadband absorbsion panels (straw), and a hinged roof, with the front opening to various degrees into the main room via hinged slot panels designed to absorb different frequencies at different hights (i.e. toms & cymbals). This allows you to change the sound to suit your requirements.
In Uru's song If love had a name, there is NO processing on the drums, apart from a small amount of reverb (Altiverb) on the snare bottem and the toms. The rest is microphone placement.

Both Uru's song and Qwan's album used the same mic set-up. Qwan's tracks are recorded using the same minimum processing principles. There are huge differences in sound between Uru's and Qwan's drum tracks - which can mainly be contributed to tuning and style of playing. Uru's drummer is Aynsley Dunbar, who plays exceptionally loud and heavy on a small kit (DW - kick-snare-2 toms), while Qwan's drummer has a more jazzy touch and uses a much larger kit.

The vast majority of guitar tracks on Qwan's record are also done according to the same principle, hardly any processing. A marshall cab with a THD Univalve amp using a Shure S7 on the cab in the main room, a L251 as a room mic, and a THD cabinet with a THD Bivalve in the booth, mic'd with a Royer R122 on the cab. The Univalve was loud and overdriven, the bivalve in the booth had a completely different setting - very clean. This provided extra attack where needed, while the room mic provided reverb where required, or was gated to kick-in when the sound needed to go into second gear.

The only difference between mics were kick mics. Qwan's tracks use a Audio Technica AE2500 dual element mic placed central in the kick as well as a Elation (killer Russian made kick drum mic!) in the hole for extra low end punch. On Aynsley's kit I also used the AE2500, but had the Yamaha sub-kick mic on the front.
Apart from the kick, the rest of the mic list was:
On if love had a name:
Snare - top Eartworks SRO omni-directional mic (not used in the mix, I just used the extra crack of the snare bottem mic.) Snare bottem SM57.
Toms - Neumann KM54 tube mics
Hat - AKG C451B, shelved at 150Hz
Overheads - (at least 80% of the total sound) Tube converted Neumann U87's (also usen on piano in Uru's song)
Extra toms on Qwan's recording - Earthworks SR77

Mic pre's used for drum overheads and vocals - Inward Connections MP820
All other mic pre's - Stagetec
Vocal mic used on both recordings - Lawson L251
Compressor / limiter used on vocals - Inward Connections

and that's about it, if you have any other questions, please ask
 
having a physics degree would be a great asset for recording because it would provides the three essential facets of knowledge required for recording

1) waves ie sine/cosine bessel functions
2) Lenz's law ie the basic principle behind almost every transducer
3) DSP/fourier ie how digital recording works

I was not suprised at all that the engineers at Abbey Road are physics dudes.

I record for fun in my basement and my two physics degrees have aided me in ways unimaginable. I understand why I have to use different mics in different situations, I understand why my studio has the acoustics that it does.
 
Is this what you call too much searching? :confused:

Last post was on 2004
 
MartyMcFly said:
Also I believe that John Lennon and George Martin invented or came up with "ADT" or Automatic double tracking. I believe it was all because John Lennon didn't want to sing his vocal track twice to double it so they came up with "ADT".
And yeah I think its a little bit of everything about the place but the huge rooms dont hurt...
Click to expand...
i think crediting john lennon for the creation of ADT is inaccurate.

He didn't like double tracking his vocals, so we wanted another way. I think you can credit Ken Townsend, one of the tech's at abbey road at that time, with the creation of the effect.

At least that's what it said in Geoff Emericks book. I mean, the tech guys at abbey road made things like leslie vocals, microphones under water, ADT, the hold open compressor technique possible.

sometimes, i think to myself, the geeks made all of that shit possible, at the request of the "talent" :)

[2004?? shit]
 
Garik said:
Is this what you call too much searching? :confused:

Last post was on 2004
Click to expand...
There's been a lot of this old thread resurection happening on here the past couple of weeks. Head on over to the mixing/mastering foum to find an even more useless thread that was dug out of the ground from 1999. It raises one big question in my mind:

What good is the Internet if people don't bother to actually read what is on their screen (e.g. date/time stamps on message posts)?

As far as Abbey Road; not to disparage them in any way - I agree they do a great job, and I agree that it's great engineers in a great space that does it. But I think a lot of the mystique surrounding them is a combination of listening to them through the legend filter and a less-than-encyclopedic sampling of the millions of hours of recorded music available out there.

If the Beatles never became the mythology that they did, and if more people listened to a lot more of the excellent music that exists beyond the Album Rock Top 200, Abbey Road would probably be considered just another fine world-class studio along with a dozen others around the world. Which is exactly what they are.

Luckily for them, they were able to ride the Beatles unicorn, which is probably why they are still in business and thriving today, instead of being shuttered up like many of the other otherwise equally great studios of the past.

G.
 
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OK, so this is a rather stale thread, but the misinformation should eventually be corrected. You hear a lot of misinformation about the history of recording and the history of tape machines. Les Paul always claims a lot. If you are curious, I suspect there are people still on the Ampex list who were with Ampex back at that time and were involved in design, contruction and service of his machines. I imagine their staff were the ones who actually built his machines, but he may have pressured them to do so. When he started wanting multitrack, that was back around the model 350 era, where each channel had a big rack of tube electronics. I think he eventually had a 1" 8 track, which would be a considerable source of heat!

Regarding John Lennon and the first 16 track, that is likely incorrect. Ampex announced the AG-1000-24 and AG-1000-16 back in Oct. 1967 and that machine turned into the MM-1000 series. Probably the first 16 track records were made in late 1967 or early 1968 on one of those Ampexes.

Wally Heider in SF used 3M M-23 (up to 8 track only) machines at that time and pressured Dale Manquen to make a 16 track for him. The project began about Memorial Day weekend 1968 and by that August they were showing a new machine around, the M-56 (500 series) that, to my knowledge, was the first "modern" multitrack where all the cards were housed in one big cabinet under the transport and all the functions were controlled by a central remote. The prior 3M (M-23s) and the Ampex AG-440/AG-1000/MM-1000 series and all preceding Ampexes were of the "one three-rack space unit per channel of audio" type of recorder with only a transport remote, if any.

The Scully guys were quite impressed when they first saw the new machine. At that time, I believe Abbey Road had largely pulled the Studer J-37s from service and replaced them with M-23 8 tracks. I'm not sure if that was in process or fully complete by that time, but the point is that John was still busy as a Beatle, doing his recording in Abbey Road Studio 2 and they would have had, at most, M-23 8 tracks at that time.

Cheers,

Otto
 
I tend to favor live recording and big spaces. I have to do a lot of my stuff alone, so I've taken to recording mainly live to two track using my portable preamp/mixer and CF recorder, which can travel easily and all runs on batteries. For one thing, my wife and I plan to buy a nice grand piano next year, but it won't be near my little studio downstairs, so I'll need to record it using the little 2-track rig and bring up a few Studio Traps to tighten up the sound around the mikes.

I used to have the dream of building a big, no-frills room with interior dimensions of about 30' high and 50' by 80' out on one of my dad's rural properties. I may still try that some day, but in the meantime I'm putting together a pair of simple portable rigs that allow for decent sound quality on live recordings in good sounding places. My UU church, for example, happens to have a really nice sounding sanctuary and they are cool with me using it on off hours. The Studio Traps are portable and handy for taming the remaining gremlins in a decent big place like that and controlling the amount of reflected sound at the mikes. The 2-track rig is already a reality. I also have a laptop, but don't yet have a FW interface that would allow me to record more than 2 simultaneous tracks on it.

Cheers,

Otto
 
i wish i could just walk in there. should be a preserved forever as a working landmark.

All you need is ears is great book. great writing style and what a class guy GM is.
 
great!

Well, I'm glad that this thread was brought back from the dead! It's an iteresting read! :)
 
Yes, All You Need Is Ears is an excellent book, and Sir George is an excellent person.

Not least of his skills, he was always very concerned about microphone placement, sometimes using more than one for an instrument, ie, one stuck right in the guitar amp, one three feet back.
 
...

Go to Blackbird, their mic collection makes that look like kids play.
 
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