SH Spotlight Vintage photos of our favorite recording engineers. Have any?

SH Spotlight - Vintage photos of our favorite recording engineers. Have any? Log In or Sign Up to View

 

Best hair in the business (and the worst):



Larry Levine and Phil Spector at Gold Star, c. 1961

Rock and Roll; In The Groove; Interview with Larry Levine [Part 1 of 3]

 

I wasn't sure - some sources place the beard look at c. 1970 which seems wrong.

I found a picture of Phil with the beard (different wig?) where he's holding a promo sheet for "There's No Other (Like My Baby)" (see here).

Also, possibly taken the same day, there's this picture of Phil at Mira Sound with the beard:



This might place it in 1963 - I don't think it's later but maybe.

Does the studio equipment visible help date the Gold Star photo?

 

James Guthrie (Floyd/Gilmour/Waters)

 

Can't say that Laurie Bamber and Chick Fowler are my fave engineers but just look at that desk at EMI (pre-Abbey Road) Studios 1940s. The oldest EMI desk in existence. Thanks to Brian Kehew for this awesome photo!

 

I've never heard that EMI Studios had a radio broadcast control room. This is news to me. Was there a dedicated radio station inside EMI at that time or was the studio used only for remotes? When did it cease to operate? Fascinating.

Info about the mixing desk from Brian:

This mixer is the oldest-known EMI recording desk in existence. It was a bespoke design made for Abbey Road studios (then called the EMI Recording Studios Ltd.) When the studio complex was young, there was very little commercially-made studio equipment; so studios built their own. This desk is an early example of almost 50 years of EMI desk designs. (It is likely there were at least two more of these desks, as the studio had three main studios in operation.)

The desk has two “scenes” which are level settings for 5 microphones; one scene on the Left and one on the Right. The engineer would fade from one pre-set scene to the other using the centre fade control. This allowed quick transitions between microphone setups, as linear controls (now called faders) were not yet common.

Below each of the 5 level controls are on/off switches, with corresponding green and red lamps above to indicate the on/off setting for each input.

 

Nice to see the band in happier days.

 

I heard that story when I worked for him years ago, and although it may be apocryphal, I relayed the details incorrectly. The documented version, and definitely the way his son told it, goes like this... After bailing him out earlier in the day Law got another call. “I’m lonesome and there’s a lady here,” Johnson said. “She wants fifty cents and I lacks a nickel.”

Don Law Jr. is pretty accomplished in his own right, although I worked for him years ago, I was the design guy so it was usually through others. The few times I did work with him directly it was usually on some personal project. Once I designed a Frank Barsalona t-shirt for a private party he was throwing for his friend and mentor. I think he was really proud of his legendary father. One occasion I ran into him in the office kitchen after a trip to San Francisco, he lit up and was pleased when I told him about my discovery of a clear vinyl pressing of King of the Delta Blues Singers at Village Music in Mill Valley.

 

People saving the images at image hosting sites and linking to them there would help somewhat, but there's still the possibility those sites go away or the accounts used to post the images are terminated. The only way to make sure photos didn't go anywhere would be to allow for posting of images directly (that is, saving the images within XenForo, as opposed to just linking to external images), but that feature was turned off years ago, presumably because it was using too much space.