CLASSIC ROCK TRACKS POLL: THE RESULTS

yeah but how does track number = sound? Limited overdubs to perfect mic postion, etc?

you can straight up here background noise in voodoo child

i'm not talking strictly about sound quality. i'm just saying a lot of what we take for granted as the basics of recorded music weren't even around until well into the 'rock era.'

*hear

although # of tracks has a big effect specifically on drum recording -- look at how many mics are placed around a drumset in a modern studio session. there might've been just one or two mics on Keith Moon's set for those early Who records. you're not gonna get a strong kick drum sound if there's just one mic hanging over the whole set.

This is really illuminating - never thought of that before about miking drums but that makes total sense. Man. Would love to hear some of those early and mid-60s rock records with the drums the way they must have sounded in the studio. Must have been frustrating for the drummers!

those early Stones records where the tambourine is practically drowning out the drums.

i love over-eager '60s tambourine mixing. sometimes it can sound silly, no doubt, but that's one of the essential features of '60s rock production imo.

yeah it can be a charming quirk of the era but sometimes i just detest it

Pete Townshend's autobio goes into a good amount of detail about how they recorded the first few albums, things that frustrated him about one record that were stepped up on the next record, the kind of equipment he was buying for his home studio and then for Rampart, attempts at quadrophonic sound, etc.

Part of the sound problem with The Who's 60s records was Kit Lambert, if I remember that scene in The Kids Are Alright correctly.

xps

...which is why the first album, produced by Shel Talmy, sounds so much better than Happy Jack and Sell Out.

more than a few modern producers have tried to go back to '60s and early '70s drum sounds by NOT using all those drum mics. more mics and more tracks does not automatically equal better. there's something to be said for trying to capture the natural sound of the drums as they would be heard from one or two particular points in a room, as opposed to the heightened artificiality of a recording that simultaneously blends 12 or 14 different listening positions. there's also something to be said for mic bleed. but in either case, whether you're talking two drum mics or 14, it is not going to sound the way it actually sounded in the studio. in both cases, you're hearing the mics and the mixing board and the point of view of the mixer himself, among other things.

Jimi was kind of hitting his head against the ceiling of what was possible in the late '60s the same way The Who were -- i can't even imagine how amazing the Jimi equivalent of Who's Next would have been.

― some dude, Saturday, August 2, 2014 5:58 PM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Charles Shaar Murray (in the indispensable Crosstown Traffic) made the point that Hendrix' earlier records with Chas Chandler sounded better -- clearer, punchier -- than Electric Ladyland did, and that Jimi on Ladyland, always impatient to put down his ideas, didn't want to spend the necessary time to get decent drum sounds, among other things.

I love Electric Ladyland, and "1983" --> "Moon, Turn the Tides" is a key moment in 20th century music. But as monumental as "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)" is, it could have been unbelievable with minor tweaks of how the rhythm section was recorded.

The Who in the 60s is a different case: when Glyn Johns was engineering -- as he did on My Generation and "Pictures of Lily" -- their shit had a presence like no-one else's. But their manager/producer Kit Lambert opted not to use Johns on, among other things, The Who Sell Out, resulting in a production far more thin that it should have been (though this was sometimes out of necessity: parts of Sell Out were recorded on the road in the US with whichever staff engineers were available in whichever studios/cities).

While Glyn wasn't the biggest fan of Moon's playing, he was the only engineer, anywhere, ever, who knew how to record Keith. Even the top-flight engineers on the preliminary Who's Next sessions at the state-of-the-art Record Plant in NYC (which were scrapped, but later released on deluxe editions and bootlegs) and Ron Nevison on Quadrophenia couldn't get a handle on how to record Moon.

oh sure, new technology caused as many problems as it 'fixed.' but now people at least have the option of using different approaches, back then you just had the limited options that were available. xp

I didn't know Johns engineered Sing My Generation -- explains a lot.

listening to The Move's version of "Do Ya" for the first time and...eh. why did anyone vote for this over the ELO one? do any radio stations actually play it?

i mean i at least get why we have 2 versions of "Crimson and Clover" in the top 500, they don't feel redundant.

I've never hear the Move version tbh. I cannot imagine how it could threaten the ELO one. But a maybe I'm not imaginative enough.

as a layperson, there is something in the way that drums and bass were recorded in classic rock in the early 70s that is super-indelible to me. the drums are very crisp sounding to me, and the bass is scary resonant. i'm thinking like, the sound of rocknroll hoochie koo, or take the money and run, or rocky mountain way. it was very definitely not "my" music, but for like the 20 years, i find that when i run across that production sound, i crank the system trying to figure out what it is.

"last 20 years"

Listen to the drums on funk #49. So killer.

the thing i love about hendrix, bonzo, page, townsend, pink floyd, even the beatles is they were all essentially starting with hammers & they all said, i fuckin love hammering what else can we do with it so we can hammer more shit better louder cooler

and they went, well what if i take the head off the hammer & put it on this

what if i add two more heads to the hammer

or like, hey is there such a thing as a nail gun? no? can we make one?

they were all mad scientists & it is so awesome that the sounds we take for granted, like jimi, were to an extent created from whole cloth just by tinkering around, hearing a sound in their head & trying to realize it on instruments or equipment that was only halfway there.
and they were so successful at it that companies MADE shit designed to sound that way afterwards because of him/them

it's such a great innovative period when you really dig into HOW they all got their sounds

yeah i was listening to "Hoochie Koo" today and was just kinda bowled over by how alive it sounded. no wonder Derringer has been so successful as a producer.

one of the best things about this poll is listening to a lot of stuff on headphones that i'd previously only heard on cheap TV or car radio speakers, some songs sound dramatically different from how i remembered them.

xpost, epic VG post

Def true that jimi was an innovator with his Leslie cab imitating pedals etc. still I wish he innovated less in the studio!

:(

I also can't believe how much a slog Maggie May is. That is the one song in this poll where my memory trumps reality.

almost everything else has been a revelation

i fuckin love hammering what else can we do with it so we can hammer more shit better louder cooler

That post is OTMFM.

And it's because of Keith Moon that the 100-watt Marshall stack was developed. It was the only way Entwistle -- supposedly, the first person ever to play through a Marshall amp -- and Townshend could be heard above Moon.

McCartney used to talk about when EMI would get some new studio gear and he and the other Beatles immediately thought, "How can we 'break' this?" He lamented the fact that newer, digital gear couldn't be "broken" in interesting ways.

xpost that's sad in light of all the problems townshend has with his hearing

Townshend swears that a couple of isolated incidents -- the Smothers Brothers explosion and one time when Roger swung around his mic and it hit a cymbal and created a huge feedback sound -- are to blame for most of his hearing loss, but it's a little hard to believe him.

Townshend keeps changing his story on the whole tinnitus thing. First he claimed it was caused by practicing guitar with headphones on ("It was EARPHONES, EARPHONES, EARPHONES!" he said in 1989), then he said it was because of the Smothers Brothers explosion, and later blamed it on Daltrey screaming during a soundcheck in Oakland in 1976.

On the Rockline call-in radio show in 1993, he tersely claimed he no longer suffered from tinnitus.

So basically, who the fuck knows.

Cool thing about the Derringer "RaRHK": it's practically all him. Bobby Caldwell plays drums and iirc there are some backing vocalists, but all the bass and guitar parts are Derringer.

more than a few modern producers have tried to go back to '60s and early '70s drum sounds by NOT using all those drum mics. more mics and more tracks does not automatically equal better. there's something to be said for trying to capture the natural sound of the drums as they would be heard from one or two particular points in a room, as opposed to the heightened artificiality of a recording that simultaneously blends 12 or 14 different listening positions. there's also something to be said for mic bleed. but in either case, whether you're talking two drum mics or 14, it is not going to sound the way it actually sounded in the studio. in both cases, you're hearing the mics and the mixing board and the point of view of the mixer himself, among other things.

― PORPOISE AND ME (fact checking cuz), Saturday, August 2, 2014 7:04 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh sure sure totally! Every recording a construction, etc. etc. But I will say that to my ears at least, the early 60s dinky-little-drum-kit sound is super far from the way I've ever heard a drummer sound live. Some of that may just be mixing of course, but man, rock drums are fucking loud IRL. It's striking even in the mid-60s when a band starts pushing the drums up a little bit - Ringo on "Paperback Writer" or Pepper's versus Ringo on "Love Me Do" seems like one of the biggest changes in their recorded sound.

Different era really but on the same tip of people pushing technology and inventing it to their spec, didn't the Boston mastermind do some of this? Electronics nerd, radio kits in the parent's basement type stuff? And then like he marketed his own amps? Or is it just that he marketed his own amps and it was hyped up that they were the only way to get the Boston sound?

Tom Scholz, that's his name, sorry. One of those bands where I fucking love their shit but actually don't know much of the bio, legend, characters, intra-band relationships, etc.

there was a story from the Quadrophenia recording sessions, when they were recording ridiculously loud & one of the women at the office got a blood nose from the decibel levels or something? details are fuzzy, my recall is terrible. it was in that 'Can you see the real me' documentary.

Yeah, their new studio was being built while Quadrophenia was being recorded, and they decided to test the new desk at 140dB (20dB louder than the concert volume that put the Who in the Guinness Book of World Records). The studio's secretary suffered a permanently ruptured eardrum, in addition to a bloody nose.

That's a great doc, too, easily the best album doc out there.

Tom Scholz invented the Rockman which was the first (iirc) headphone guitar amplifier. It worked so well that Def Leppard used it in lieu of standard cab+head amps for Hysteria.

Everything on Boston's debut was recorded by Scholz in his basement, except for Brad Delp's vocals.

xxp

loving the turn to recording. Please keep going everyone.

That was sincere btw

i just bought this yesterday btw, i'm sure i'll start stealing anecdotes from it for posts any day now. there's a chapter about Mike Shipley (no relation)'s work on Hysteria!

http://musicconnection.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/BehindTheBoardsII_coverWeb.jpg

Wait, are you really Dave Schramm?

fuck, I need that xp

ha, I wish with that cast

(There are many david schramms)

loving the turn to recording. Please keep going everyone.

Yeah totally. This is like the making-of extra feature.

Maybe not recording, strictly speaking, but still interesting:
http://youtu.be/O5voNyRmvXs

thread continues to deliver

McCartney used to talk about when EMI would get some new studio gear and he and the other Beatles immediately thought, "How can we 'break' this?" He lamented the fact that newer, digital gear couldn't be "broken" in interesting ways.

my fave mccartney analog studio reminiscence is in the complete beatles recording sessions book, where he waxes nostalgic about the chicken-head knobs on old-school studio equipment. nowadays, if someone wants to turn up an instrument in a mix, they can turn up by increments of hundredths of a dB, increments that basically no sane human can hear. in ye olden days, if you turned that chicken-head knob up one position, it actually got louder. you couldn't go from 1 to 1.15 on that dial. you had to go from 1 to 2.

i'm a big fan of working with limitations,

if there's one '60s band i wish had been recorded better, though, it would be the kinks circa something else and village green preservation society.

Was thinking about Won't Get Fooled Again because I was thinking about Come Sail Away - I don't think of the Who as really having that many soundalike acts, and Tarfumes observed that they were very hard to imitate ("because it's so difficult to get a handle on what the fuck they were doing") - but wow, the big royal return from the long break: BR-AANG! BRANG BRANG, BR-RAOW!... is straight out of the Townshend windmill playbook. No Moon, though.

quaint adjective \ˈkwānt\
: having an old-fashioned or unusual quality or appearance that is usually attractive or appealing

^intrinsic to vgps imo