Leave it to Motown to make mixing a 3-track a complicated mess!

Check out this page writtren by Motown engineer Bob Denis!

http://recordinginstitute.com/alex/alex01-5/multmast.htm

 

Well whatever they were doing, you can't argue with the finished results!

 

Wow - thanks! They liked to bounce quite a bit in this period when they were still using the 3-track decks. I wonder if these work parts were saved?

 

Sounds like some sort of "job security" scheme to me.

 

Nice link, Grant...

you know it really isn't such a "complicated mess."...

...but just the way the job was done 40 years ago. The Beatles and George Martin were working in a similar manner, though perhaps not identical in every step. More live performances, and less "isolated overdubs," for example. In general, this holds true for all the top bands of that time.

While some of the details have changed, much of the information in that link is simply good engineering practice, and still applies today. You might be a good engineer yourself, y'know?


peace to all,

 

Berry Gordy based Motown's way of doing business from Detroit's Car factories - little wonder that engineering was done one part at a time like a Mustang assembly line.

And no wonder why those mid 60's recordings sound so "Squashed" and EQ to the extreme with all the bouncing (4 generations of the backing track).

Didnt Motown have an 8-Track recorder by 1965 to keep them from doing this?

 

Yeah, but they still did it. What ever it took...

 

Second that, I enjoyed it quite a bit and noticed there are a couple more articles on Motown on the site (which I've not read yet). Thanks .

 

Thanks Grant for posting that article on the original Motown multitracks. That explains a lot about the dynamics and the guitar buzz from the guitar amps that have to be filtered out. I wish to GOD that they would invent and echo remover which would help a lot of us out in this business .I am truly Grateful for the stages that did survive the Comp reels. The Motown Engineers had to make Decisions that who help mixing them in Mono and a nightmare for some of the stereo mixes. I am still amazed that we can accomplish some good mixes even with the road blocks. Tom

 

So much bouncing. Very surprising that those Motown hits sounded as vibrant as they did sometimes. I would think that all that bouncing would make things quite "muddy". Now that I think of it, the Motown sound may have been muddy, hmmmmm.

I record on digital 8-track. Even though I have the benefit of Virtual Tracking (which would give me 64 tracks to work with) I prefer bouncing (usually to a CD-R recorder) and then keep bouncing once I fill up the 8 tracks. It doesn't seem to heavily degrade sound quality and my CD-R recorder has the benefit of SBM so it seems I gain more quality in bouncing than I lose. I'm not a fan of Virtual Tracking. It's too much to be working with at once.

I like the idea of engineers competing for the best mix. That's something I would do myself.

 

Hehe, I thought they were going to run out of letters for their reels for a minute there .

However silly this process sounds you can't argue with the results. Motown had a "sound" that everybody wanted and this explains the origin of that "sound" .

Like Jared, I think that last stage of competing to get the best mix is a great end to the process. Whatever happened to this kind of attention to detail?.....

 

no comment

 

Please stick around awhile, Tom. Most of us here love to get the "inside track" that you guys have. Any additional projects coming out that you can speak about, or behind the scenes discoveries are always welcomed!

 

Fascinating article, thanks for posting Grant. Was any other recording studio with 8-track (Atlantic?) doing anything like this?

Jason

 

Did they ever really need to bounce that much once they started using 8 track recorders? Maybe occasionally, but I can't figure out why it would have needed to be done on a regular basis by then, unless the liked filling up the tracks pretty quickly.

 

Well, IIRC, the Beatles tracks weren't that complicated early on, and when they started to get very complicated, they were on four track tape and they'd bounce tracks down on an ad-hoc basis.

But I agree, it's actually a really well-defined engineering process. I'd also note that this system seems remarkably sophisticated for a record company in the sixties.

That said, I wouldn't want to be any one of the engineers involved in that process ...

 

Different strokes...I would've loved it!
I cannot imagine anything more exciting than to have been in the middle of the creative process in the glory years of MOTOWN (well, maybe Abbey Road).

 

This article claims that "Lawrence T. Horn mixed every single Motown release betwen 1964 and 1967". It's already been established that Berry Gordy's brother did the stereo mixes which many around here love to hate. This alone makes me question how much else of this article is true. Since a close friend of mine was a pupil of one of the original Motown engineers, I'll see if I can check this out. I suspect this is Lawrence's system, and not the "Motown" system.

Derek

 

With Motown, you never know. I don't think Bob Dennis would lie about that. What would he gain from it? Horn is in prison for life, so he wouldn't gain anything.

 

What happened with Lawrence Horn that he's in prison for life? Killed someone I guess, considering he's got that kind of sentence? How long ago did this happen?

 

Or maybe he was working at Worldcom.......

 

Some of the processes listed in the article sound really complicated and time consuming. I can't think that Berry Gordy would wait for engineers to so intricately "clean up" "multitracks. Usually, the Hitsville Studios were in session almost around the clock on a daily basis. I also doubt that the engineers went to the trouble of "erasing the lead vocal track during the intro and instrumental break" as I have many alternate and unrleased mixes of Motown tracks where things like that were not removed.

I now understand why Tom Moulton's response to the article was "No Comment."

 

He hired a hitman to kill his wife, 11-year-old child, and his caretaker. They all survived. He wanted the money that his son inherited from a lawsuit that left him disabled. The hit man got the death penalty.

This all happened in the early 90s, about after he was layed off from Motown and was doing work for H-D-H.

 

I've read this article before...it sounds like the dates are a bit off. I doubt any new recordings were made on 3 track after the home built 8 track was installed in 1965.

On the "old" soulfuldetroit.com forum, Motown's Chief Technical Engineer, Mike McClean posted about 9 long pages about the technical history of Motown Studio A. It was a great read and he's the kind of guy that remembers EVERYTHING.

Too bad it's no longer on line...hopefully it still exists somewhere.