SH Spotlight Echo/Reverb history in recorded music..

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by ROLO46, Mar 8, 2010.

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  1. Steve Hoffman

    Steve Hoffman Your host Your Host

    Once again:
     

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  2. Greg1954

    Greg1954 New Member

    Location:
    .
    Okay, it's The Church, I can dig it.

    I had picked up some other info that said (around this time) Victor had location equipment set up in a hangar somewhere to make some records of travelling dance bands, outside of the state of New Jersey. But it may have been wrong.:shrug:

    It's also important to remember that Victor had New York studios operating, Camden, at the Academy Of Music in Philadelphia...

    Busy company.
     
  3. Steve Hoffman

    Steve Hoffman Your host Your Host

    They recorded "Territory Bands" all over the country. All labels made field recordings. Sometimes those are just wonderful (like Robert Johnson records).. After 1934 pretty much the pop stuff was blanket city..
     
  4. ROLO46

    ROLO46 Forum Resident Thread Starter


    Les and Mary were soaked in artificial echo.
    They are multi generation and hifi ish but not natural events.
    Les was a hobby genius and show biz pro.
    Bill Putnam a recording pro.
    In my umble opinion.:angel:
     
  5. Dan C

    Dan C Forum Fotographer

    Location:
    The West
    I can't listen to a modern 'hi-fi' traditional big band recording, especially those stereo recreations from the 70s and 80s. That dry in-your-face-with-the-horns-blasting-out-eardrums sound is as much a part of the swing era for me as Lucky Strike smokes. :D

    Strong exception for the Ellington recordings made at Columbia's 30th St. studio. Those are a whole different matter, musically and sonically.

    dan c
     
  6. Steve Hoffman

    Steve Hoffman Your host Your Host

    Agreed. In my mind the "dead" but smooth and powerful sound of Swing Era recordings scream "authentic!" to me. Modern "re-creations" don't have that sound.

    Let's take care of this. Take a good big band, go into a carpeted, dry room, get two RCA ribbon mikes and an RCA optical-limiter and recreate the Big Band Era! Heck, go right to digital. It will still sound just right. I've tried it!
     
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  7. Holy Diver

    Holy Diver Senior Member

    Location:
    USA
    In a related subject, no Marshall amp from the 60s or 70s had reverb on them. It was all added in the studio digitally, even Hendrix. No Marshall amp, ever.
     
  8. Steve Hoffman

    Steve Hoffman Your host Your Host

    I doubt it was added digitally. There was no such thing back then. I believe you are talking about an analog echo chamber.
     
  9. ROLO46

    ROLO46 Forum Resident Thread Starter

    I have a guilty secret.
    I tweak tiny amounts of delay/ verb onto my 50's monos.
    I keep both in Tunes and compare and contrast
    I prefer wet but not wet wet or wet wet wet.
    Please don't blackball me for this heinous admission..
    I'm about to try my hand at Gerry Muligan Quartet with Chet Baker
    Those dry Radio Recorder studios or the Forum theatre need a tiny slap of delay and a tickle of small room verb.
    I'm a deviant...

    But you should hear some jazz masterings for total excess
    Were they all on heroin????
     
  10. wildroot indigo

    wildroot indigo Forum Resident

    The Victor studio kept the church pipe organ (and further adapted it)... hence all those great reverberant pipe organ jazz sessions by Thomas "Fats" Waller: the solos (1926-29), Waller with Thomas Morris and His Hot Babies (1927), and the Louisiana Sugar Babes (1928), some of my all-time favorite records.

    Fats returned for his last sides at the church studio pipe organ on January 5, 1935: "Night Wind" and "I Believe In Miracles" by Fats Waller and His Rhythm.
     
  11. Hard Panner

    Hard Panner Baroque Popsike & Fuzz

    I can't really add anything to this thread, but I would like to say that I'm really enjoying reading this thread. I'd like to see more threads like it.
    Fill in the blank:
    "________ history in recorded music."
     
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  12. sgtmono

    sgtmono Seasoned Member

    Of course there were other brands of amps that did have built in reverb, like Fender.
     
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  13. ROLO46

    ROLO46 Forum Resident Thread Starter

    At that time in the UK verb was not fashionable
    delay (echo) was.
    Lots of boxes (Binson,Watkins,Vox,Selmer) provided good delay.
    The basis of RnR and pyschedelic recording.
     
  14. Steve Hoffman

    Steve Hoffman Your host Your Host

    Yes, indeed. My Victor of "SUGAR" goes down to like 20 cycles. It's years ahead of other recordings.. Amazing for 1929.
     
  15. jsmiller

    jsmiller Forum Resident

    Location:
    south florida usa
    Wow! Great thread...I have a ton of jazz and pre-jazz CDs sourced from 78s as well as LP reissues of this material from the 60s and 70s and even early 80s...How do I know which ones have added echo/reverb? I mean, I know what it is, but is it that easy to tell if it's been added? Are there specific reissue series on LP/CD that are known to have added echo/reverb, or is it basically a hit or miss proposition to identify the culprits?
     
  16. ROLO46

    ROLO46 Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Frank Laico,Columbia recordist (Round Midnight,Miles Davis etc) had used an echo chamber at Columbia's Studio C from 1949 ( a U47 and a speaker in a 12x15 concrete storage space)
    He could regulate studio C with it.
    However he was unhappy with it and on Les Pauls advice passed it through a tape machine,this warmed things up and increased delay.
    'Afterwards ,everybody in the business showed up ,including guys from England,wanting to know how we got that echo chamber sound'

    So there we have it.
    Source 'Sound on Sound' April 2010

    Roger
     
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  17. Steve Hoffman

    Steve Hoffman Your host Your Host

    Thanks, Roger. A trick that Abbey Road used on the first Beatles' recordings..
     
  18. varispeed

    varispeed what if?

    Location:
    Los Angeles Ca
    This thread reminded me that my Dad bought a Cadillac in 64 that had a reverb unit in it. Push-pull switch and level knob up by the radio in front. I remember him twiddling with it at the car dealership with the sales guy. When on, there'd be this huge horrible wash in the car. Bizarre stuff... I had totally forgotten about that car. I do remember djs being mixed in with lots of reverb back then too.
     
  19. Doug Sulpy

    Doug Sulpy Forum Resident

    Location:
    Pennsylvania
    I have a Victor Scroll of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir ("By The Waters of Minnetonka" / "Devotion") recorded in '25 in Salt Lake City that has tons of natural reverb – the most I've ever heard on an early 78.
     
  20. Perisphere

    Perisphere Forum Resident

    If I didn't find the worst one a few days ago I scored one in the top 5: Woody Herman's LIGHT MY FIRE LP (Cadet LPS 819). Recorded October 1968 at Ter-Mar in Chicago (aka the Chess Records Studio), the 'production' (SIC) by one Richard Evans (who was also arranger of all the titles in the album) made it a wretched attempt to be 'hip' or 'psychedelic' in places. Everything heavily compressed, drenched in plate reverb overkill (and even tape echo slathered over the top of all that), with that nasty transistory upper-mid hash (the sax section sounds like it was recorded with bad SM 58s)....astoundingly bad. Listen for what happens to the trumpet solo after about 7.25 in this clip: 'MacArthur Park'

    Compare with the warts-and-all vastly superior recording Columbia gave the band at Basin Street West just three years earlier: '23 Red'
     
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  21. Robin L

    Robin L Musical Omnivore

    Location:
    Fresno, California
    I remember when I finally got my 78 copy of Charlie Parker's Ko-Ko on Savoy. Dry as a bone, unlike any of the LP remasters I owned. Even weirder—that famous "Massey Hall" concert of Bird, Diz, Mingus, Roach and Bud Powell? Finally heard the original tape, sans the post-production Mingus inflicted on the recording. There's gobs of reverb on the Debut release, but the original tape has soloists obviously going right to the mike. There's practically no "Room Sound" when Bird or Diz are soloing.
     
  22. Perisphere

    Perisphere Forum Resident

    I have a Blue Steele Victor scroll....maybe you had this one as well, it's got a lot of natural reverb on it.
     
  23. edb15

    edb15 Senior Member

    Location:
    new york
    Quoted from Russ Sanjek's American Popular Music Business v.3, talking about early 1930s:
    "RCA Victor had issued a number of imported British HMV masters, of music by the Ray Noble ochestra [sic], whose superior sound qualities rapidly became the talk of the trade. Record supervisors called on their British associates to learn the secret. It lay merely in the oversized studio used for Noble’s disks, a mammoth sound stage on a film lot. It was a far cry from the usual small recording rooms in America, with their bare cement walls, unfelicitous hardwood floors, and meager wall drapings, which combined to frustrate any improved quality that might have come from the recently developed directional microphones suspended overhead from booms. A press agent said that Noble’s practice was to place his men at the far end of the studio. By the time the sound reached microphones at the near end, it had acquired the distinctive quality for which a small army of American record buyers was spending money. Victor, Columbia, and Brunswick were soon engaged in a veritable musical comedy of searching for sufficient space in which to reproduce the British sound and spotting musicians in outside halls, inside men’s room, and all over. Brunswick was the first to solve the problem. Its musical director, Victor Young, began to record in a Los Angeles motion-picture studio."
     
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  24. Steve Hoffman

    Steve Hoffman Your host Your Host

    As I mentioned earlier, the fad was over by early 1935, Juke Box operators complained..
     
  25. Steve Hoffman

    Steve Hoffman Your host Your Host

    I checked, the link is still good if anyone is interested..
     
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