How Music Works (19 page)

amplifier boosted the level of that signal so that the guitar player could finally compete with the rest of the band. Guitar makers assumed that since the

pickup was only sensing vibrating metal strings and not “hearing” the acous-

tic sound of the guitar, one could eliminate the problematic resonant chamber of the acoustic guitar that gave much of the quality to its unamplified sound.

Les Paul’s early guitar was nicknamed “the log,” because that’s pretty much

what it looked like—the resonant chamber of a typical guitar had been elimi-

nated entirely.

I first heard “Purple Haze” over a transistor radio when I was kid, and

I remember telling my dad that something new had happened. I excitedly

explained to him that electronic music (the weird sounds of Stockhausen

and Xenakis that I was vaguely aware of, to say nothing of the theremin)

was, via the amplified guitar in Hendrix’s hands, now being melded and

shaped by an acoustic instrument. The sounds Hendrix (and others I didn’t

yet know about) were getting were nothing like what an acoustic instru-

ment sounded like. That unwritten law of staying true to the sound of a

traditional instrument had been violently broken, and the amplifier and sig-

nal-processing devices (pedals mostly) had become an integral part of the

sound of the instrument. As with Theremin and his instrument, the electric

guitars were breaking free of history. Their available range of sounds wasn’t constrained by any specific cultural trajectory. It seemed that music would

be liberated from the past.

The electric guitar still privileged Western scales, unless you used a slide (as with those Hawaiian records). The frets that determined the notes were

still, like a piano, set to play recognizable scales and pitches, but the sounds 104 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

you could get from an amplified instrument were almost limitless. Piano-

like plunks, percussive scratchy chords, saxophone-like rasps, and gamelan-

like bell tones. No other instrument could do all this—certainly not to the

same extent—and as a result texture and tonal quality increasingly became

part of composition. The same parts, played on another instrument, might

be the same song, as far as traditional copyright or a written score is con-

cerned, but at some point we began to associate songs with the specific

guitar sounds used in the most well-known recordings. This wide sonic

palette is almost impossible to pin down in conventional notation, and it

still isn’t considered as much a part of composition as the melody that the

singer sings or the choice of chords that accompanies that melody. That

definition of a song, of composition, still derives from an acoustic era, and mostly evokes a songwriter or composer sitting at a piano coming up with a

top-line tune and some interesting chords to harmonize with it. Naturally,

the
sound
of the piano or the voice isn’t really considered a factor in what is written—at least not in this traditional view. Some of Tom Waits’s songs,

for example, would sound pretty corny sung “straight,” without his trade-

mark growly vocals. The sound of his voice is what makes them work. Jangly

or wah-wah guitars became as much a part of a song as the lyric or top-line

vocal melody.

The synthesizers that emerged in the seventies and early eighties were,

like the theremin, unhooked from the provenance of musical culture and

tradition. The blips and gurgles they produced weren’t an extension of any

existing tradition, so, despite the fact that they were sometimes used to

imitate existing instruments, they could be incredibly liberating tools. The Mini Moog, invented by Bob Moog in 1970, was the first really affordable

and portable synthesizer. Earlier versions of these instruments were massive and massively complicated affairs that took days to program. Moog’s innovation eventually made something esoteric familiar. An early pioneer in this

technology, Bernie Krause, said that the Chinese, then quite doctrinaire in

their version of communism, felt that this instrument, untethered as it was

from history and traditional culture, was perfect for their New Society. They brought Krause over to teach them how to operate this revolutionary instrument, but the Mini Moog was never embraced by the masses, and revolution-

ary operas continued to be based on older musical models.

DAV I D BY R N E | 105

PLAYING WITH YOURSELF

Les Paul, the same guy who built one of the first electric guitars, can also lay claim to having invented multitrack recording. Multitracking involves

recording a performance and then rewinding the take to the beginning in order to add more music to it. You can add your wife singing, as Paul did with his wife, the singer Mary Ford. Or you can “play with yourself,” as Paul also did—

recording and playing the drums first and then adding more than one gui-

tar part, creating a virtual one-man band. You can also vary the speed of the recorder to create odd effects—impossibly fast runs, for example. In 1947, Paul and Mary recorded a song called “Lover,” which was the first commercial single to have been recorded in multitrack. Les Paul’s multitrack was closer to what we now call a sound-on-sound recorder. In his early version of this technology, you could add to a previously recorded track, but then those two performances would be forever joined. If you made a mistake, you had to start over from the beginning. A bit like painting with watercolors, or cooking.

My dad modified a small Norelco reel-to-reel recorder when I was in high

school so that it could do this. I recorded layer upon layer of guitar feedback, eventually ending up with a howling, screeching virtual guitar-ensemble. A

friend and I then tried to do something a bit more accessible, recording a version of the Turtles song “Happy Together,” using potato-chip cans for drums

and singing harmonies with ourselves. It was endless fun, but annoying and

frustrating as well—a single mistake meant starting from scratch.

With sound-on-sound machines, the “tracks” you recorded first were

effectively being copied over every time you added another layer, so they

diminished in quality, sounding more muffled the more new parts you added.

You would therefore often record the tracks you knew would be in the fore-

front last, as those needed to be clearest and most hi-fi—usually that would be the vocal.

Many bands, including the Beatles, used a variation of this technique.

Although they had a true multitrack recorder at their disposal, it only had four separate tracks. If they wanted to add a fifth track, they had to record the four existing tracks onto two tracks of a second four-track machine, effectively

giving them two new tracks on that second machine to record on. However, by

doing this, all the previous recordings on the original four-track machine had now gone through an extra generation of recording, and the balance between

106 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

those tracks was now set in stone, just like with Les Paul’s technique. Mostly this was unnoticeable, but if it happened repeatedly, the dulling effect began to show.

THE LP

With the introduction of long-playing records (LPs) in 1948, record

companies encouraged artists to record music specifically for this

new medium, as the new discs could be sold for more money and generate

more profit per unit than mere 45s (or 78s, which were being discontinued).

Some artists took to the idea, and they began to stretch out a little to fit the new format. Thematic LPs emerged. (Frank Sinatra was an early adopter of

this format, with his collections of low-key songs designed for late nights

in bachelor pads.) LPs containing thematically linked songs—typically from

Broadway musicals like
Oklahoma
or
The Sound of Music
—were hugely popular. By the end of the sixties, extended jams made their way to discs, as did compositions by Miles Davis and various rock bands, which often took up an

entire side of an album.

LPs had their own technical limitations. They hold about 20–24 minutes

of music on a side, and the louder the music (especially the lower pitches), the deeper and wider are the grooves that get etched into the master disc.

That meant these low or loud passages ended up using more physical space

on the disc, and therefore there would be less total time available on the LP

for the music. Big-bottomed music had to be either quieter or shorter to fit on discs. You could have plenty of low end on your record, but then the overall volume level would often have to be adjusted lower, and though folks could

always hit the volume knob on their home player to compensate and make

that record as loud as any other, low volume on radio and jukeboxes created a real disadvantage.

With classical music, the size and depth of the grooves would vary over

the length of one LP. In the quiet passages, the grooves could be very skinny and tightly spaced, and more time and music could therefore be squeezed into a given space, which might then be offset by the wider grooves necessitated

by louder, lower-pitched movements. Technicians, called mastering engineers, became adept at figuring out how best to squeeze the greatest amount of music DAV I D BY R N E | 107

onto a disc while maintaining the maximum possible volume and dynamic

range. Cutting lathes, the machines that etched the grooves, automatically

adjusted the groove size according to the sound being recorded, but the mas-

tering engineers were the ones who decided how much could fit on a side and

whether to lower the volume of the whole side or subtly alter the music a bit by selectively decreasing the volume of the lower pitches.

There are actually people out there who can identify classical recordings

just by looking at the grooves on the LP. They can hold up a piece of vinyl and see that there is, for example, a quiet passage occurring about three minutes into the record, a loud crescendo at minute fifteen, and a medium-volume

passage at the side ending at around twenty-two minutes—and from that

they can guess what recording it is. Such a feat wouldn’t be so easy with

pop music, which tends to be recorded (and composed) at a more constant

volume. In live performance, pop music needs to be heard over a boisterous

and often drunken audience, and quiet passages can get lost. With the advent of radio it quickly became apparent that extremely loud and extremely quiet

passages were abrasive and distorted on the one hand or would get lost on the other, so a kind of standardized consistency of volume came to be favored.

Volume became a make-or-break quality for records. Records that
sounded

louder jumped out of the radio or jukebox speakers and caught the atten-

tion of listeners, at least for a moment, but that was enough to stop the listener from turning the radio dial. I emphasized “sounded” because the sounds couldn’t actually
be
louder than those of their competition. Radio stations had legal power, and therefore volume limitations; they couldn’t actually play some songs louder than others. But there are psychoacoustic tricks that both musicians and record producers began to employ that could fool the ear into

thinking
a song was louder than the one that had preceded it. The use of compressors, limiters, and other devices to create apparent volume became more

and more popular. On radio, these devices could—when applied to the entire

broadcast output—make one radio station sound louder, and possibly more

exciting, than its neighbor.

Other tricks for increasing apparent volume were musical. By skillfully

adjusting the arrangement of the instruments in a recording, one can achieve some of the same effects as a compressor, but without the sometimes annoying, artificial, and intrusive (if it is audible) “squashing” effect. If fewer instruments are played along with the singer while he or she is singing, then the

108 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

vocal can be heard clearly without having to be louder than everything else.

Spreading instruments and arrangements over the pitch spectrum helps too.

Instruments that play in the same pitch range compete with one another to be heard, so it is generally better to assign different frequency levels to each part if you want them to stand out. If everyone plays parts in the low end of their pitch range there’s a good chance everything will end up fairly muddled and

indistinct, but if they spread the wealth, then the individual parts will appear more distinct and the whole thing will appear to be louder.

CASSETTES

In 1963 a Dutch company called Philips developed the cassette tape. Tapes

were originally used only in dictation machines, given the quality of the

recordings was not very high. But by 1970 that changed, and they began to

be used for music. These little things were portable, you could play them

in cars, and they didn’t scratch or wear out as quickly as the more fragile

LPs. Philips also decided to license the format royalty free, and as a result other companies adopted it without having to give a piece of their income to Philips. By the mid-seventies these pocket-sized plastic things were everywhere. Cassettes could hold a little more music than LPs, but more impor-

tantly, the machines that played them could sometimes record as well. The

general public was now back in the recording business, just like it had been in the early days. (Home-style reel-to-reel recorders had been available previously, but they were bulky and expensive.) People began to make tapes of

themselves singing for Grandma, they copied their favorite songs from their