Virtually any major record has a backstory detailing how and where it was recorded, often involving a particular sound—like the Muscle Shoals sound, named after the famous Alabama studio where much southern rock was recorded, or the otherworldly sound produced by the pioneering British recordist Joe Meek in 1962 from the reverb chamber above his modest London studio, on the record “Telstar” by the Tornadoes. Recording engineers, like many largely invisible technical workers, are at last becoming visible and audible.
Susan Schmidt Horning has written an important book about what recording engineers do, how they do it, and why it matters. She draws mainly on interviews with engineers, arrangers, and producers and focuses largely on popular music. The record industry is one of the biggest parts of the entertainment and culture industry. We all know about the Beatles, but we know little about the people who operated the gear that turned them into recording artists. Even less is known about the small independent studios that thrived in the 1950s and 1960s and that were crucial in recording new sorts of artists and styles of music. Schmidt Horning herself is well placed to tell the story. A historian of technology, she was once part of a rock band and found herself at age sixteen in a Cleveland recording studio. Indeed, some of the most fascinating material in the book comes from unknown studios in Cleveland. The striking frontispiece of the book shows Thomas Boddie in Cleveland in the 1950s at the controls of his recording console, turning huge radio-style knobs in front of a giant tape recorder. Boddie was one of very few African American recordists—and thus made doubly invisible, by ethnicity as well as by profession.
Schmidt Horning wisely avoids big picture or big sound narratives. Her book starts with acoustic recording; moves to the influence of radio and tape, as studios electrified and small studios became important; and goes on to the hi-fi stereo era of recording where, with multitracking, the studio became in effect an instrument. A useful chapter also explores recording engineering as a profession in the United States, one that emerged from the many amateur recordists who were gripped from the start by the new hobby of sound recording, often figuring out for themselves how to do it.
The book provides us with wonderfully detailed accounts of recordists at work. The earliest recording studios, in the 1890s, were little more than laboratories where recordists experimented by surrounding an artist with multiple separate cylinder phonographs, each with its own horn. The skill of the early recordist was to start each machine, one after the other, to record batches of cylinders—up to ten at a time. Recording was hard work for artists and recordists and far from glamorous. It was only when the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso recorded for Victor in 1904 that recording became respectable and financially attractive to artists. It was not until 1925, with electrical recording, that the recordist worked from a separate control room.
Schmidt Horning, like most contemporary scholars, shoots down the myth that recording was somehow a rendition of live performance. Recording was always a product of skill, technology, and culture; once a hit was made, the performing artist had to try to emulate the recording rather than the other way around. The materiality of the technology and the instruments used was clearly important. String instruments sounded notoriously weak when recorded through a horn, for example; a special instrument—the Stroh violin, which provided a form of horn amplification on the body of the instrument—was invented especially to overcome this problem.
One of the most memorable stories in the book describes how musicians in those early sessions literally had to be manhandled in front of the horn and then wrestled away in order for other instruments with a weak acoustic signature to have a chance at being heard. Studios were often makeshift and recordists were sent around the world to record what we would today call world music, in anything from a grass hut to a hotel room.
The industry changed rapidly with tape recording, high fidelity, and stereo recording. Producers became important. Many recordists in the 1950s were self-taught, having come from radio or having learned about electronics in the Signal Corps. They were not adverse to building and designing their own gear. A photograph in the book shows the legendary recording engineer Tom Dowd, who started off as a physicist on the Manhattan Project, working on a Cream session. In the background, behind Dowd and producer Felix Pappalardi, sits Ahmet Ertegun who as head of Atlantic Records knew better than anyone the importance of the recording studio. From the 1960s to the 1980s, it was the place on which record companies could lavish huge amounts of money because there were millions of dollars to be made by making sure artists continued to produce the hit recordings upon which the whole industry spun.
One of the most important ideas in the book is that the skills of the recording engineers are largely tacit—and that this is what makes them easy to overlook. They move stealthily between control room and studio, swapping mics in and out, adjusting levels, making little suggestions to performers to make the recording better. They use their “ears of experience” whether to EQ the bass, for instance, or whether to go for the warm sound produced by a ribbon mic. This book is highly relevant to the new field of sound studies because it charts the work of a community of sound practitioners. Schmidt Horning's story stops before the current Pro Tools era and the demise of the very studios she studied. Those who want to learn about small businesses and how they can be incubators for novelty will find much of interest in this book.
