How Music Works (25 page)

In the Recording

Studio

c h a p t e r f i v e

In the Recording

Studio

By the time I entered the music business, multitrack recording

was commonplace; at least sixteen tracks were available to record

on, and often there were twenty-four. Recording took place in a

special soundproof studio with super-thick doors (often covered

with carpeting), lots of wood (often arrayed at odd angles), and

the entire place built around a massive console that looked like the deck of the starship
Enterprise
. Obviously, or so it seemed, mastering this control panel would be far beyond the abilities of mere musicians. The recording engineers and producers relegated us to another soundproof room in which we played,

and then to plush couches situated in the back of the control room, where we could hear how we sounded. It was all pretty intimidating. As I write this, that era is coming to an end.

When I was in high school, I heard pop records that I knew had been made

by overdubbing instruments on top of existing band tracks. The strings on

“Sound of Silence” and many other pop tunes were added after the guitars

and vocals had been recorded—sometimes, as with that song, without the

band’s knowledge! Sound effects were added to recordings, quiet instruments

could magically compete with loud ones (due to the ability to now control the relative volume of each instrument), and impossible sonic effects could be

achieved, like a singer harmonizing with himself. In the realm of experimental DAV I D BY R N E | 139

music, composers were cutting up tapes on which sounds had previously been

recorded, tossing them in the air, and then reassembling them. They were mixing electronic and acoustic instruments and speeding up and slowing down the recordings, creating otherworldly effects. I knew this was how the records I was listening to had been put together, and I wanted to do it too. Not with the idea of being a pop star or having a musical career, but for the sheer excitement of it.

I began to mess with my father’s modified tape recorder, recording layer

upon layer of guitar feedback and other “experimental” odds and ends. Inspired by John Cage, the Beatles, and others, I cut the tape into short fragments and reassembled it at random—some sections inevitably ending up backward.

(That sounded pretty cool to me as well.) Happy accidents were welcome.

The possibilities of recording as a medium in its own right were immediately apparent, but my early experiments were pretty unlistenable. Later, in art

school, inspired by Philip Glass, Terry Riley, and Steve Reich, I layered multiple staccato guitar parts, played at different speeds, to make a soundtrack for a student film. It was terrifically atmospheric, but it didn’t work so well as stand-alone music. That was when I first realized that whether music “works”

or not has a lot to do with context.

Years later, with Talking Heads, we recorded demos of some of our songs.

These weren’t meant for public consumption but to “demonstrate” the songs

to others—people in the music business, most likely. Some recordings were

made at the home studio of a friend who had an affordable piece of gear,

the Tascam prosumer 4-track recorder. Tascam and a few other companies

made equipment that was almost good enough to make commercial records

on, but was mainly aimed at the “prosumer” (half professional, half regular

consumer) market, the aspiring recording engineer and his or her musician

friends; other Talking Heads demos were recorded at big professional stu-

dios, but not via multitrack—we recorded mostly live to stereo. One was

recorded at a studio on Long Island where bubblegum hits had been made.

Two others were paid for by record companies, partly so they could hear us

over and over without having to visit grotty clubs every time. These record-

ings sounded tinny and thin and gave no sense of what the band sounded

like live. There is an art to capturing the sound of a band, and it seemed at the time that neither we nor the guys who made those recordings possessed

that particular skill. Even those professionals in their big studios didn’t

seem to know how to do it, and we thought those skills came with the job!

140 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

This was a real mystery. One could see why musicians and recording engi-

neers would be inclined to get magical and mystical about studios where

epochal recordings were made. It was if glorifying the aura of those places

was a way of admitting that skill is not enough, that some invisible mojo was present in the woodwork at Sun Studio or Motown Studio, and it was that

ineffable essence that made the records made in those places so good.

When we eventually made our first proper record,
Talking Heads: 77
, it was by and large a miserable experience. Nothing really sounded like it did

in our heads, or like we were used to hearing ourselves on stage, although

that might say as much about our heads, our expectations, or our sound as

we imagined it as it does about how the recordings turned out. Or it could

just have been bad mojo. Everybody knows the weird sensation of hearing

your own voice played back for the first time. Well, imagine a whole band

hearing themselves played back for nearly the first time. It sounded weirdly enervating, jarring at best. Then add to that the experience of working with a producer who we felt didn’t “get” what we were about. He had produced

some disco hits (we liked that) and had a current one with a disco ver-

sion of the
Star Wars
theme (we thought this was kind of tacky). We loved and appreciated commercial pop recordings, but we were also the children

of the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, Beefheart, and all sorts of other

fringe characters. That part of our schizophrenic make-up wasn’t, we felt,

acknowledged or understood by this guy, so sometimes it was tough staying

optimistic about the project from day to day. It was probably tough for the

producer and his team, too. Our experience in a real recording studio, mak-

ing a real record, certainly didn’t turn out to be the big exciting and satisfying thing I’d imagined in high school.

In those days, the drummer would be set up in a booth a little larger than

a handicapped toilet stall, with a glass window for viewing, and the bass

player’s amp would be miked up and surrounded by sound-absorbent pan-

els. In this way, the band would be completely sonically deconstructed. We

had to wear headphones just to hear each other. The producer would then

try mightily to recreate the sound of the live band by feeding the signals

from the various mics back into those headphones. Taken apart and put

back together by a stranger—no wonder it felt uncomfortable!

To their credit, the producer and his team did try to bring out the acces-

sibility inherent in our somewhat minimalist, stripped-down sound. So while

DAV I D BY R N E | 141

the other singles on the CBGB jukebox were guitar-centric, ours had Stax-

Volt-type horns. The record was fairly well received, but I didn’t think it

captured the band very well.

DECONSTRUCT AND ISOLATE

That phrase sums up the philosophy of a lot of music recording back in

the late seventies. The goal was to get as pristine a sound as possible, and even before multitrack recording became ubiquitous, it was typical to try to remove or avoid all ambient sounds—not only the sounds of birds, traffic, and conversations in other rooms, but all of the room ambience as well. Studios

were often padded with sound-absorbent materials so that there was almost

no reverberation. The sonic character of the space was sucked out, because

it wasn’t considered to be part of the music. Without this ambience, it was

explained, the sound would be more malleable after the recording had been

made. You’d keep your options open as long as possible, in other words. Dead, characterless sound was held up as the ideal, and often still is. In this philosophy, the naturally occurring echo and reverb that normally added a little warmth to performances would be removed and then added back in when the recording

was being mixed. Sometimes this echo and reverb, the stuff that would be

used to recreate the missing ambience, could be treated as an effect, too—one could “overdo” the reverb for a distant spacey sound or add short delays, as was typical of the vocals in early Elvis recordings. But the rest of the time, adding echo and reverb meant trying to artificially recreate something that had been purposefully and expensively eliminated. Seems like kind of a crazy system, but it was all about keeping control throughout as much of the process as possible.

Recording a performance with a band and singer all playing together at the

same time in the same room was by this time becoming a rarity. An incredible array of options opened up as a result, but some organic interplay between

the musicians disappeared, and the sound of music changed. Some musi-

cians who played well in live situations couldn’t adapt to the fashion for each player to be isolated. They couldn’t hear their bandmates and, as a result,

often didn’t play very well. I also hated this situation myself at first, but after many years I began to adapt. I’m not proud that I got used to this arrangement, but I did. I persisted in believing that what the microphone and the tape 142 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

machine played back was more or less exactly what we had played, despite the fact that often what I heard on tape didn’t sound like what I had just heard in the room. I assumed, as Edison claimed, that technology was neutral, though

now I know it isn’t. My ears were telling me one thing and conventional wis-

dom another. Which was I to believe? Other musicians and producers blos-

somed in this world, and took advantage of the opportunities that allowed

them to construct elaborate simulations of bands and orchestras, but I felt

like it wasn’t working for me at all.

As pianist Glenn Gould pointed out, recording technology put part of

the creative process in the hands of the producer, the tape editor, and the

recording engineer:

It would be impossible for the listener to establish at which point the authority of the performer gave way to that of the producer and the tape editor, just as even the most observant cinema-goer cannot ever be sure whether a particular sequence of shots derives from circumstances occasioned by the actor’s performance.1

One could argue that these technicians were as responsible for how

records came to sound as the composers or performers were. In effect, the

authorship of a recording, and of music in general, was being spread around, dispersed. It became harder and harder to know who did what, or whose

decisions were affecting the music we were hearing. Though music copy-

right and publishing still reflect an older, more traditional view of compo-

sition, these creative technicians demanded (and often received) an ever-

larger piece of the monetary pie. Often they got a larger percentage than the individual performers.

Just as theater is an actor and writer’s medium, and cinema is a director’s

medium, recorded music often came to be a producer’s medium, in which they

could sometimes out-auteur the artists they were recording.

Earlier I mentioned that this recording philosophy meant idealizing the

isolation of each instrument. This made eminent sense for vocals, which

would inevitably have to be mixed so that they could be heard clearly above

the din of the instruments that were often acoustically louder. However,

there were risks in doing this. If there was a lot of drum “leakage”—if the

sound of the drummer could be heard on the vocal mic—then every time

you made the singer louder to hear a lyric better, the drums would inevitably DAV I D BY R N E | 143

get louder too. But isolation, which was the solution to this problem, often meant that we later found it hard to play together live. A band would go

from being a tight unit to a chaotic mess.

Yet this divide-and-isolate approach still had much to recommend it: mis-

takes on individual instrumental tracks could be fixed later, effects could be added to one instrument at the mixing and balancing stage without affecting

another, and the relative volume of each instrument could be determined in

mixing so that, for example, the brass parts could be made quieter during the sung verses.

As we discovered with Talking Heads, simply sticking up a mic and assum-

ing that it would capture the truth of a performance didn’t necessarily result in something that
felt
like a band, even though it was, objectively, capturing exactly what you’d played. I have gone out into the world with a good-quality recorder, and it’s fascinating to listen to the results of recording common

places whose sound you’re super familiar with. The true audio chaos of a

place is evident in a recording. Though I use the word
true
, and though this might be what enters our ears, it’s not what we “hear” when our brains process that sound. As far as our brains are concerned, what is “true” is often wrong.

Sound mixers in movies work much like recording engineers do. They

isolate the sound of the actor’s voice as much as possible, and then recre-

ate the ambience of the environment later, adding birds, crickets, restaurant chatter, or whatever else is needed. What’s fascinating is that even those

“natural” sounds are not “true” documents of an environment. For example,

the sound of
one
solitary cricket mixed quietly into a scene can evoke a complete outdoor nighttime ambience in the mind of the audience, even