History of CBS Records 30th Street Studio NYC (many pictures)

What a great thread! I'm not so familiar with the soundtracks recorded at the 30th Street Studios, but this thread is making me want to listen to them. Yet another reason why this forum is the coolest music discussion zone on the 'net. Thanks for sharing all this great info! Cheers!
-------- Chris

 

Some really interesting stuff here. My father was Glenn Gould's last producer and can be seen around the 3 min mark on the '81 Goldberg Variations (the longer complete version). He started working for CBS in the late 50s as an engineer and stayed with them until he retired in the late 80s. His only break was his time as a singer in Mitch Miller's Sing-Along Gang. My only time meeting Gould in the studio was Sept 1st or 2nd '82 but that was up at the RCA studios.

 

Thanks, Tim, glad you like it. And thanks for introducing yourself.

You don't have any pictures from your Dad's time inside any part of the studio, do you?

We'd all love to see them...

 

PLEASE share any info or photos that you may have Tim!

 

Last night I went through what I have of the Plaut Collection to look for pictures of the NE doorway and anything showing what might be parts of our newly-discovered South wing of the building.

I found some of those things, and also found illustrations of other things we've been talking about recently.

First in reply to the person who thought that Mitch was actually Pete Fountain, here's another pic from that same session



Clearly Mitch, clearly an oboe.

Next, here's a shot of Frank Laico in the old control room in front of the window, with a startlingly out of place hinge mortise



That's the top of the window running into his shoulder and continuing on to our right. I can't get over the use of recycled lumber in their brand new control room in the late 1940's.

This next one is for Luke, since he is a scholar of air handling systems



This is the operatic soprano Eleanor Steber who we met much earlier in this thread in front of a clearly separate air vent. Would that be cooling (wouldn't think they had air conditioning) or air return?

Here's another from the same session of her and Jean-Paul Morel, with those curved baffles and the NE door visible.



Clearly it's the wood door, so this must have been before the 1956 Sound of Music / Glenn Gould sessions where it's aluminum.

Regarding those baffles, which we saw in much more detail recently in this thread and saw they apparently had masonite concave faces: those things must have really screwed up the sound of the recordings on which they were used. Concave reflectors give a weird focal point in space with lameness or nothing everywhere else. Convex reflectors at least diffuse sound everywhere and don't build it up in one spot. Yes, the focal point is louder, but the time is all screwed up if the source is not exactly in the focal point and it's a smear rather than a clean sound. With the benefit of hindsight, the polycylindrical diffusers and the concave reflectors clearly didn't work, although the abstract idea of "adding focus" to the room had to be attractive initially. /rant

You'll notice that in almost all the pictures when they are not in use they are turned sideways rather than pointing into the room, and then they are completely gone from all pictures.

Lastly for this post, here's one of a session with Percy Faith and Mitch Miller as soloist, showing what might be a hybrid door



I've made it a bit bigger than the previous ones so you can zoom in if you want.

This door looks like it's still a wood door, but there's either a window or a mirror on the top half of it. Your guess is as good as mine which it is; mine is mirror, since it looks like there is a mic boom in it, and why would there be a mic boom in that store room when they left them out in the studio. Or maybe they were storing them for a while. Mirror would be easier to add to a solid door than window.

We'll look at more from that session in the next post.

These pictures and those in my next couple of posts are from MSS 52, The Frederick and Rose Plaut Papers in the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library of Yale University.

 

Here's a shot of Percy sitting at an unusual instrument: a harpsichord.



That is only exciting because the next picture



shows the harpsichord chart and tells us that this is the "Moonlight Becomes You" session, which I have only been able to date to 1955. Anybody have a more precise date?

Fred must have thought that the harpsichord music was especially interesting.

I thought that was a cool find, and cool that he left it for us to find.

Next is one of Bruno Walter (I think)



with the door fully open? And a person visible in there?

Finally, here are a couple from the March 1960 A Thurber Carnival session(s)



This is Peggy Cass studying her script or the paper or something, sitting in front of a monitor, while we can see the aluminum door in the background. What's all that junk on the bottom half?

Here's what I hope is a blowup



Is that a bunch of tape on the bottom? Did somebody smash the glass?

I think we'd need more resolution to be able to tell.

 

That's the south wall, looking southwest; the large air vent is just to the right, and the double doors in the southwest corner are just out of frame to the right. Presumably the system was used for heating at least, if not cooling as well.

The door is definitely closed in the first shot. Same white rectangle (sign?) near the top, similar markings down the left side.

Not sure what more there is to say beyond "it's kind of a weird door".

 

This next batch is pictures that I think might have been in the South Wing of 207 E. 30th St.



Pretty sure that's David Wayne on the left. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Wayne He had a long and distinguished career playing nice guys. There are a number of other pics of him in the Plaut Collection, all from the same session I think.

Here is a closer look at part of that same room



That heat vent is reminiscent of those in the studio, so that encourages me that this is the same building. Not sure of the variety in heat vents in those days, though. And the windows look like they could be the windows visible from the street.

Here's a couple of George Avakian and Fred. There was another posted much earlier in the thread with them in the same room





The fellow who looked somewhat like Harold Chapman and Ward Cleaver was also sitting there, and so is Fred



Jumping to the next post since that's five pics.

 

Here's Fred again



Those may all have been the same day, since that same piece of gear with the big rotary pots is open on the desk. The last two show an air conditioner in the window, but the exterior pic we have doesn't show an air conditioner. Maybe they put them in seasonally?

Last but not least for today, here is a picture of Don Hunstein



that I want to be somewhere in 30th St.; it has a weird mix of elegance (the indirect lighting, the wall treatment, the seasonal decorations) along with a garbage can handle on what looks like some kind of door opening. Any other ideas of what we're looking at?

That's it for today. Thanks for reading!

Oh, and Happy Holidays in case I don't get back to this enough in the next few days.

 

Seems must like these all must be in the center portion of the building, on the third floor. That appears to be the only area where the windows are close together (roughly a foot apart).

That said, I'm scratching my head a bit. The first photos, with white (?) wall and horizontal blinds in the windows, seems to show two windows right next to each other, with walls on either side. Yet the center area of the 3rd floor had 6 windows in a row. Same with the second set, which also appears to be a different room, as opposed to just the same room at a different time with different paint or something.

I'm at a bit of a loss; it doesn't seem like there could have been windows in back, even on the third floor. Unless these weren't from 30th Street? Can't say I know where that would be at 799 Seventh Ave either, however. Or one or more of the 3rd floor windows was blocked off?

Maybe Jim Reeves knows?

 

I'm pretty sure that's not George Avakian in those pictures. Same facial hair style as in Avakian's later years, but the face is different, plus the guy in the picture is way too old for what Avakian would have been back then.

 

Pure, 100% speculation, but I wonder if that may have been Vin Liebler. I believe he would have been about 50 at the time of those photos. I'm seeing a record for a Vincent J Liebler from Long Island, 1904 - 1989, and J was the middle initial of the Columbia engineer.

Unrelated to the photos, but I just stumbled across this (bolding mine):

"When in the late 1940s CBS president William S. Paley made the fateful, and apparently highly unpopular, decision to transform Liederkranz Hall into television studios, Columbia engineers and recording directors canvassed Manhattan for a suitable replacement. They eventually found an ideal venue in an abandoned Greek Orthodox Church on East 30th Street. Built on solid rock, with three layers of inch-thick maple and pine flooring providing a solid wood wounding board, Columbia's 30th Street Studio would eventually earn a reputation as 'the "Stradivarius" of recording studios', thereby bestowing upon it the ultimate designation as a musical instrument. [17] That reputation came only after a good bit of acoustical tweaking by Columbia engineers, who faced the challenge of transforming a vast empty space with impressive but unruly reverberation into a functional recording studio in which that reverberation could be controlled without altering the structure. The biggest challenge the engineers faced, according to William Savory, was the fact that the acoustics of the room, measuring 97 feet long, 55 feet wide, and 50 feet from floor to ceiling, had to be 'brought into focus'. [18] Savory described the reverberation as very good for some things, but too long. 'As a result, if you were playing something staccato or rather rapid, it would tend to merge with everything else. A string of very distinct sixteenth notes would come back as a smear [because] you were immersed in reverberation.' [19]

To counteract this, engineers placed microphones as close to the source as possible to get more direct rather than reflected sound. But this close-miking in turn made it difficult for musicians to judge how loud they should play. Members of The New York Philharmonic, for example, were accustomed to playing with their own dynamics, developed over years of playing together. As Savory recalled, 'you sit them on this thing where they have microphones closer to them, they can't use those dynamics. They have to restrain themselves.' To counteract that, engineers tried flat baffles - upright partitions positioned in different areas of the room in order to break up or redirect sound waves. Eventually, Savory came up with his own design: eight-feet tall parabolic-shaped baffles placed on wheeled tripods so they could easily be repositioned. Savory often put the reflectors behind the musicians so they were unaware of their presence. This gave the recording engineers more control over the sound, and the musicians a better listening environment, but not all were pleased with what they heard. Some of the musicians, 'especially the brass men', Savory recalled, 'thought it was wonderful ... it's like having your music under a magnifying glass'. Placing the reflectors close to the musicians produced a more direct rather than reverberant sound; moving them back reduced the intimate presence. But some of the musicians thought it was strange, and one violinist told Savory, 'This is going to make me go home and practice a hell of a lot more. I can hear all my mistakes!' [20] Just as musicians began to adjust playing style after hearing themselves on record for the first time, technical fixes for acoustics caused musicians to change technique, another example of what musicologist and historian Mark Katz described as the 'feedback loop' between recording and musical performance. [21]

The decades-old challenge to engineers of positioning musicians in a recording studio, once a matter of crowding and jockeying for position around the acoustical horn, had taken on new proportions with the increased sensitivity of microphones, magnetic tape recording and the ambience of truly 'live' studios. The problems of controlling sound did not vanish; they simply changed forcing engineers to contrive new solutions. Because of this, many producers were initially reluctant to use the 30th Street Studio until Columbia Masterworks vice-president Goddard Lieberson recorded the original Broadway cast album of South Pacific there in 1949, just as the musical opened to rave reviews and record-setting advance sales. [22] Lieberson had told the engineers he wanted to make a studio recording that sounded 'like a Broadway stage' and for that, the 30th Street studio proved ideal. [23] The engineers had succeeded in reining in the church's reverberation without muffling it, and the album became a blockbuster hit. The results impressed other artists and producers who soon began using the studio Mitch Miller produced his first Columbia recording session there in February 1950 with singer Rosemary Clooney and continued to favour the 30th Street studio, which along with Liederkranz Hall he considered 'the best'. [24] Miller apparently loved using Savory's parabolic reflectors, especially with singer Johnnie Ray, who stood between two of the reflectors to bounce his voice, enhancing the natural reverberation and thus his vocal presence on a number of recordings, including his first big hit, 'Cry'. [25] Rays exaggerated articulation, what one critic described as a 'hyphenated style of singing' that emulated doo-wop and early rock and rool vocalists coupled with the use of studio techniques to enhance his voice, worked to create the singer's unique, identifiable sound. [26]"

The Art of Record Production: An Introductory Reader for a New Academic Field

And the relevant references, again, bolding mine:

17 Vincent J. Liebler, 'A Record Is Born!' Columbia Records (1959), p. 4.
18 The dimensions are from Liebler, 'A Record is Born!', p. 4. Columbia engineer Frank Laico estimated the ceiling at one hundred feet, which probably refers to the apex of the central arch. Frank Laico, telephone interview, 13 January 1999.
19 William Savory, telephone interview with author, 21 October 1999.
20 Savory interview, 21 October 1999.
21 Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
22 Morris Hastings, album liner notes to Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, South Pacific, Columbia Masterworks Lp 4180; Brooks Atkinson, 'At the Theatre', The New York Times (8 April 1949): 30.
23 William Savory, interview with the author, Falls Church, Virginia, 29 November 1997.
24 Mitch Miller interview, 21 January 1999. For more on the 30th Street studio, see Ashley Kahn, Kind of Blue (New York: Da Capo Press, 2000), pp. 75-7; Charles L Granata, Sessions with Sinatra: Frank Sinatra and the Art of Recording (Chicago: A Cappella Books, 1999), pp. 42-5.
25 'Men Behind the Microphones: Makers of Music for Millions,' Newsweek (8 September 1952): 56-9.
26 Will Friedwald, CD liner notes to Johnnie Ray: 16 Most Requested Songs, Columbia/ Legacy Compact Disc, CK46095. I thank the late William Savory for sending me this recording and noting which selections utilized the parabolic reflectors.

Note the dimensions come from Liebler, from a 1959 write-up. It would be great to dig that up, as well as the Newsweek article.

So, 97'x55'. I don't think 88'x48' was too bad for eyeballing it from photos If we estimate that the 3 main sections as well as all of the end walls were 22 feet each, that gives us about 97'x53'. It's not clear where the other 2' would be accounted for, but that's still pretty close. I guess the main question would if the 3 walls on each end were the same length or not. If not, then all bets are off.

My inclination at this point, when I get around to doing a new diagram, is to draw it to 97'x53' and make a note that it was supposedly 97'x55'.

 

Any info or photos of the basement reverb chamber?

 

No idea. Those are the only 2-track machines I've seen in the control room. I don't want to speculate too much about why they were in those cases, but it wasn't long until those were gone and the 3-track machines in normal racks took their place.

 

Being carted around seems plausible.

Was the Mathis recorded at 30th Street?

Unfortunately shots of the tape machines are few and far between on the Masterworks site, so it's not really possible to pin down when they got the 2- and then 3-track machines. At least not via those photos anyway.

 

Interview with Frank and Mitch in Studio Stories: How the Great New York Records Were Made: from Miles to Madonna, Sinatra to the Ramones. Mitch also made this claim:

"...Which is why we never even did any kind of maintenance in there - no cleaning, no painting, nothing!"

In light of all of the photos that show various changes over the years (some minor, some major), I continue to find those statements baffling. It's hard to tell for certain in print, but it doesn't sound like it was meant to be hyperbole.

He also mentions the ceiling was "about 100 feet high" [sic].

 

From my research at Sony Music in the '90's when researching my discography on Columbia's singles, it would appear that Mathis did indeed record at 30th "back in the day." His first pop session - which yielded "Wonderful! Wonderful!" / "When Sunny Gets Blue" and "It's Not For Me To Say" - certainly emanated from "the Church." Thus I presume "Chances Are" would've been recorded there, too.

 

To my knowledge, they were usually (always?) done in what I believe Columbia termed "edit" rooms. Frank Laico claimed that early on he did some of that himself, but then as time went on, he didn't have the time, and other engineers handled that.

Don Meehan might know more, but I don't know how much he worked with material from 30th Street.

Some photos of the rooms at 49 E 52nd Street are on Jim Reeves' site:

http://www.reevesaudio.com/vintagesessions.html

 

Don't know about that particular Mathis song, but there are pics of him there. Here's one showing him listening to playback, and another in the studio with his shoes on a stool.





Frank would frequently tell the story (I think it's in the video in the first post) about Johnny coming in as a high school student and having too small a voice to do anything with. Mitch told Frank to spend a couple hours in the studio with Johnny just finding some combination of microphone/compressor/EQ/reverb that would work on his voice and once they agreed on it, it was locked in place with all settings copied so that every time Johnny was in the studio he would have those exact settings on his voice.

I bring it up because wouldn't the studio have an effect, too, so they'd always have to be in the same studio?

And Wikipedia says it charted in 1957, so that would have been after the parabolic reflectors, polycylindrical diffusors, and the two-track were long gone. The only pics of that two track are from 1953, I think, although I'm not sure when the one of the sleeping guy and the two track was taken. All the pictures that I've seen from a few years before and after 1957 show the three-track recorders in the booth.

And again, with the benefit of hindsight, the acoustic treatment was eventually determined not to have worked and was removed. I also don't think that the effect of the floor sealant wearing away can be ignored. I have a floor where the Varathane has worn away, and it sounds very much less reflective than it did when it had the solid top coat. That floor in 30th St was huge and had to have a large acoustical impact which was IMO probably better after the gloss was worn off during the "don't touch it" era, and got worse when they redid it in the 60s or 70s.

 

I believe this is correct from what Frank said. There were people who did this elsewhere, certainly not at 30th St. and not by the engineers who put the music on tape.

 

I'm nearly certain 1953 would have been 3 years too early for the 2-track machines. 1956 is much more likely, both because of the state of tape machines at the time, and the fact that significant changes were made in late '55/early '56. That is, those changes were *likely* made to coincide with (or prepare for) the introduction of stereo recording. Unfortunately for us, you can't see any tape machines in any of those great LIFE photos of the February 1956 Gould session.

We know the initial Gould sessions in 1955 were done in mono, as was My Fair Lady in March 1956. I see there are a few "binaural" tracks available from Li'l Abner from November 1956. This is in the Muze writeup:

"The disc is, in fact, full of new material, including a stereo version of the "Overture" (Li'l Abner was Columbia Records' last cast album not recorded in stereo, but the label was experimenting)"

It's likely that stereo was slowly experimented with initially, but nevertheless, I'd be really surprised if those stereo machines were there any earlier than 1956.

And this brings up another mystery. I already mentioned that it looked like the flooring was replaced (or at least relaid) when the changes were made in 1949, due to the fact that it *appears* that the flooring ran in a different direction for Kiss Me Kate. But look at this shot from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, from December 1949:



That floor looks really, really rough, especially for one that was apparently brand new. Tons of scratches all over. Did they - perhaps - rip up the flooring when making changes, possibly to fix some sort of problem, and then put it back down on the diagonal, without refinishing it at all?

It looks like it's probably fairly beat-up in the Company film from 1970 as well. Again, my *feeling* is the floor was likely refinished when the old control room was removed and other "fixes" were made...possibly after Lieberson retired.

 

Yes, you may be right. The ID sheets with the Plaut Collection named George as being in most of the pics on that page, but maybe they were wrong or I read it wrong. You really need to have the contact sheets to use their ID system, and I only took individual pics of some on each sheet, so there's a margin for error there. There's lots of ID sheets that ID everyone with "?", and we've/you've put names on a bunch of them here.

OTOH, Fred looks older in those pictures, so it must be later in his life and GA's, too. Do you know when that pic of Avakian that you posted was taken? He was born in 1919, so in 1979 he was 60, for example. That guy in your pic looks in his 30's, maybe.

Here's a late pic of him and that earlier one



Different look, but maybe the same????

Why would GA have been up in the workrooms, anyway? Is it another unknown engineer?

Thanks for bringing it up.