Using this gear does, I think for most people, the thing that strikes you about it is the honesty of it. And I think that is what makes the records that were made with this equipment timeless. A garden centre in Essex, England, is not the first place you'd look for an authentic 50s recording experience.
But Sugar Rays is just that, in just such an odd location. We visited to learn about the studio and what it's like to work and record with 50s gear in the modern day. The songs we recorded with Race With The Devil are available to download from the Sound On Sound website.
Check below for a link. I thought it would be interesting today to look at the effect of adding microphones. In a sense, if you think of this place as winding the clock back, we're going to see start right at the back. We're going to start with one microphone.
And what are the advantages, what are the challenges of one microphone recording? And then we'll move it on to two. And then we'll move it on to three, and then we'll move it on to four.
And we'll see what effect that has. in terms of how you produce music. Then the time machine stops and then in your mind you can go all the way to the present day when people put 14 mics on a drum kit and decide whether what are we gaining what are we losing I'm not I don't know I'm as excited to find out as you are.
I think it would be easy to sort of look at all this gear and think well this was all this stuff was abandoned pretty quickly in the 60s and and for good reasons because sometimes it's quite limiting and difficult to use but compared to a modern studio which I'm much more used to working in and I'm sure most people are. There is an immediacy about using this equipment, especially on a vocal. You just dial it in and you go, well there it is, there's the sound.
And there's something about that sound that I think just appeals to people. I think that's the magic of it. It's instant gratification if you like.
On every single level of Sonics you can criticize them and the way that they're put together and there's a lack of bottom end and there's a lack of top end and all that kind of stuff. Why do people still like them? Because the reason is they connect with people.
What we're doing is one mic recording for the first track. At the moment I've got it set up so that you're on the positive side. of the mic and everyone else is on the negative side of the mic and I'm hoping we can get a blend with that if we can't if there's too much band and spill I'm going to move you 90 degrees right and you'll be that facing that way and then the band will be in the dead spot of this mic because it's a figure of eight pickup if that doesn't work yes we'll have to stop putting some screening up but I think it'll be alright okay all right so you have the bass presumably I'm having him I'm moving him back and forward yeah just just to try and get the best option.
Should we get my crap out of the way? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We're getting there, we're getting there, we're getting there. Do you reckon you could go a little drier? Because we're adding a slap to the entire mix.
Oh, so you want less off this? Yeah, so if we're-Do you want anything off that? I think we want a bit, because it's gonna be a different time to the 50 IPS, so a little bit. What about reverb? Less reverb and if you could bring the whole thing forward maybe a couple of foot The idea I had for Sugar Rays was from probably about ten years ago I, as a musician myself, I was Going into modern studios and coming out with a sound that wasn't really emulating the style of music we were playing So I thought to myself I would love to build a definitive 1950s recording studio in every sense of the word.
That was from microphone performance to tape. There's a lot of modern studios that have got some old equipment. They may have a couple of old mics, might have some old Portex, they might even have an old tape recorder. But they're not recording the whole process as I'm doing here. experiencing is exactly what they experienced when they recorded these great records.
That's exactly what they would have experienced. And we do as, you know, the engineering side. I've taken obviously a lot of inspiration and a lot of ideas from Sun Studios. I've tried to use all the American equipment that was used where Sun was.
Sam Phillips was recording of course and that there's a lot of the equipment I've got here is what he used at Sun Studios. We've spent probably four years in fill testing studio and ironing out all the problems because setting the whole studio up was one massive undertaking the next massive undertaking is actually getting it so that it all runs nice. But I think now particularly with Lincoln on board, that we've got it fully under control as can be. It's mixing in three dimensions basically. Figure of eight mic, the positive side towards the singer that's going to have a slightly more depth to it on this side and everything else is going through the back of the mic.
The sides of the mic are dead spots so that I'm minimizing the reflections coming off the walls of the building. put in lots of random angle panels as well to have to randomize reflections as well so they don't come out as actual notes and that's it really ultimately it's down to the guys to maintain the level they've done at soundcheck and then we'll press record hopefully it'll be good off you go The challenges are really that as much as when you look at all this stuff you know you've got all these you've got all the knobs, but in the real world, they don't really help you all that much because you're dealing with a live environment where there is total bleed with microphones that have... quite an unpredictable characteristics between them and pick up from the back and all that kind of thing so it may say bass on that knob and you turn that up but you actually when you turn that up you actually might get more drums depending upon where where things are and the way things are set up so really the The skill of being the engineer in this kind of environment is what you do out there more than what you do in here.
Essentially in here you try and stop things from clipping, you try not to over compress things. If you want a little bit of nice distortion, you try and find sweet spots, but essentially your mix is all done out in the live room. Oddly enough, the most information I've gleaned is from the photographs on the walls here, because as much as there are a lot of a lot of publicity shots but there's also a lot of quite rare photographs here of sessions. Particularly with double bass, using a ribbon mic with double bass is a recipe for trouble because you're dealing with a very very boomy instrument that has unpredictable sub frequencies and a microphone that has a really high level of proximity effect.
So you put those two things together and it's not what you would choose to do but you can get a really good sound and looking at the photographs around around the place of the different ways that they used to do that has really helped. I'm not sure there are classic placements of Rigmund mics. I think every single time we have a band in it's different. And I use a lot of Rigmund mics at my own studio and every time it's different.
And if you look at all the pictures that are in this studio of sessions from the 50s, you won't find any two the same. It really is. put it near the instrument, have a listen, and then see what's going on, and then try and fix if there's a problem. I suppose if there is a classic thing, it's the way that you use the dead spots. And that's what, as much as ribbon mics can be difficult because they pick up front and back and you get a lot of bleed, the fact they have dead spots can make them really useful. And the way you use that dead spot is always a consideration.
Are we going to use two mics? mics in a sort of bloomline style array. It's two figure of eight mics in the same plane at 90 degrees to each other. It's really useful for keeping stereo recordings really nicely in phase.
What I'm trying to figure out here is obviously when we use the one mic I've got a really nice bass response because there's virtually no phase cancellation, well the only phase cancellation is reflections from the wall. coming to the mic but once you put two mics up obviously you've got problems or potential problems so I'm going to basically put them in a bloom line have the positive sides one for the vocal one for the bass and then there is everything else will be taken care of by the negative sides of the mics. Let's see how we go. What we have here is essentially a 15 into 3 into 1 setup.
There's three signal paths we keep one which is pretty much purely for vocal and that will have its own compressor and its own EQ. Everything else has to share the other two compressors and the other two EQs, so everything else just gets chunked in together really. So that's why it's so crucial that you have the placements right. This array here is, as you can see, full of Altec, old valve Altec stuff, and we have three of the 1567 5 into 1 mixers.
These are a valve mixer that has four mic channels usually and one line. These were used in the 50s but also way into the 60s. Originally I believe they were a PA mixer, so you'd find them in dance halls and places like that. There's a sweet spot with the gain on the mic channels where with certain singers you can get a really nice... Edge to the voice.
It's quite a small sweet spot so you can easily slip into distortion but it's there particularly with female vocals I've found. It's just a really useful bit of kit I mean It's all passive. There's no phantom power.
So you can't blow up ribbon mics. That's always good good The EQs are pretty good both both shelving EQs But yeah, these were popular into into the 60s and used on on soul records and Motown stuff. These are the compressors that again, there's just the world's full of records made that went through these. These are modded, I think Dean will be able to tell you all about this, but Abbey Road modded these for their own use and these were the classic compressor they used for many many years. These particular ones have not been modded, these are still squishy old compressors.
I particularly took interest in the desk that Norman Petty was using in 1958. It was a mono desk and it was using these Altec mixers, exactly these mixers, which are 1567A mixers, and he had three of them. these which I have got he linked them to the 436 Altec compressors and he then used EQing from Pultec EQs which we've got here as well. The 58 mono desk this is essentially exactly the desk that he used for those recordings and the Ampex tape recorder that he would have used it would have been the either the 350 machine over there or this 300 here which is an early 50s 1953 machine.
So that's his kind of setup, that's what we'll be using today to record the band that's coming in. The 3-track machine is this one here which is very rare. This is a 300 3-track half inch machine.
And this would have been only really used in the top Chording Studios, the big studios, RCA Capital, they would have had these ones because they obviously had the money to buy them. They were extremely expensive machines. Well the big interest about these machines is what they would have recorded. There's no log, or there's no provenance unfortunately with these machines.
It's very difficult to get provenance on what they actually were used for, but one could say that they may have been used for some very famous recordings. Who knows? The real owner of racks will be fascinated by this little device as well because this is probably the most rarest piece of equipment I've got believe it or not and yet it's probably one of the smallest pieces.
These are the remotes for the transport on the machine next year the 350. But I've been talking to a guy in America just recently about these and he's never seen one in 30 years and he trades in Ampex all the time. There's very few people that got them. This is a Collins 212E 1956 desk and well it's a broadcasting and recording desk so you've got queuing on this you've got for broadcasting use there's a lot of outboard stuff that they would use often. this so you've got all the facilities on that desk to use for broadcasting radio broadcasting as well as recording and even tv work as well because that's again the thing with all this equipment it was universal used you know they would not necessarily just use it for recording purposes but the poor techs are we've got the mid-range one which we use for vocals then we've got this one up here which is a mastering one which is a notch one which has got the notch controls on it and then we've got this one here which isn't a pool tech but say that actually this is a car tech but it's is essentially a poor tech but probably a bit more reliable A lot of this equipment baffles you, it just doesn't work like a plug-in at all. I mean, these are always compressing.
If you're putting something in them, they're compressing, as far as I can hear. I don't think the needle necessarily tells you all that much. I've got them set to the slowest release time that they have. But I honestly have never noticed them be affected by the fact that I've put them in that setting. They just compress and that's...
they do it in a very nice way, luckily. So I suppose that's why they're always very popular. One of the real really tricky things about working in this environment is that EQ and compressors don't do what you would normally expect them to do. When you're working with minimal number of microphones and you're obviously focusing on a vocal in a booth, you're obviously focusing you can compress that vocal and you just get that big fat sound. In a room with a band you can't do that because all you do is increase the roominess and the boxiness so you have to be really really careful with with a compressor.
Similarly the EQ if you if you want to If you've got a male singer and you and they're getting a lot of proximity effect and you want to reduce the bass Well, you're gonna lose the double bass so You have to move the singer That's the bottom line and or you know you can't the old 77s and 44s do have settings on them but you're making a choice what you lose because you're going to lose something else whereas in a modern environment where everything's separate you can you can go crazy with with compressors and EQs and do anything. Sounds pretty good. That's good actually with the two...
Yeah, so we're going three mics now. So yeah, we've got back to a dedicated vocal mic and we've got a dedicated bass mic. 44 above the drum kit, but pointing at the guitar amp.
So we're trying to capture the two noisy guys with one mic. I've put some more screening up so I can, in theory, use some compression on the vocals, so we can make them... bigger.
We'll see if it works or not and also the vocal mic is turned so that the drums are in the dead spot of the vocal mic. Who's left, John? Go!
Go, go, go! Go, go, go! The equipment's not readily available on eBay.
It's more available through the certain dealers that deal in it. And they will sell it to clients on our website. a sort of personal basis and the RCA44 microphone I purchased that from it came from Scottsdale Arizona and it came from a chap whose father died who collected the microphones in the 50s and particularly collected new old stock brand new microphones in the boxes and he sold these microphones and I got to know that they were for sale and I bought the RCA44 or BX from him which was brand new still in the original box came in the RCA's box with the instruction manual with the the tags on the leads all tied by string all we did was retention the ribbon on it and make sure that it was working within the parameters it should do. And it's being used in the live room all the time, principally for a vocal mic. In the pictures where they've captured bands working in studios, that inspiration comes through to the...
bands when they're working in here. Same microphone. I'm singing through the same microphone, like this picture up in the corner there of Elvis singing through a 44. And they come in and they're singing and they're thinking, well the only thing I've got to really do is sound like him because other than that the microphone's the same. There's some key microphones used in the 50s.
The RCA's probably have the lion's share of the usage of mics. That's the 44 of course, the 77, and then they did a 74. Shure microphones were used. I mean we've got some Shures here. That would be the Fatboy 55, the 55, the 355. Then you've got the Altex which are the 639 Berg cages.
The most famous tape echo I suppose really is the one that Sam Phillips developed and that's to use two tape recorders, sending away one and then bringing it back and then that was mixed back into the desk. The other echo that we... use is this Dyna-Cord up here which is a German device and this particular one is a 62s which is a 1960 61 which is a tape echo. It's got variable amount of slap back echo you can use. It's also got reverberation on it as well.
So the other effects we have, of course, is the EMT plate, which I managed to find a very early one, a 1957 mono plate, and EMT bought those out in 1957. So that's the first year of manufacture. And that particular one is serial numbered 87. Oh. RCA bought loads of them. I mean, they had six or seven in their studios together. They're banks of them.
Oh, and also we've got this one up here, which is the Watkins copycat. Okay, so we're going to go up to four microphones now. So that's one RCA44 for vocals as we've been using all day. Classic. We've got a Birdcage Altec ribbon mic down there.
there on the floor which you can't see but it's right down there by the double bass so that's got a dedicated mic now over at the drums and noisy people department I'll just show you these there is so we've got a pair of 77 One is above the drum kit and it's pointing its dead spot at the guitar amp which is hopefully going to aid with some separation. Similarly the one that's on the guitar amp, again the drum spot is in the dead spot. The drum kit is in the dead spot. Not too fussed about where I position that guitar amp mic. It's going to sound pretty good.
I want a... reasonably roomy sound. I don't want it to sound super close mic'd because it would just not sit with the rest of the mix.
But that's it essentially. This is pointing the dead spot into the noisy area. The bass takes care of itself, kind of thing, so I'm hoping that this one's gonna gonna go off with no issues.
What is ramped up is the ability to get drier signals on everything on the plus side. On the downside it's ramped up the complication. of just having different bleeding signals coming through into the desk. So for instance, on that three mic setup, there was a real nasty ring coming off the guitar amp.
So... classically with this kind of rig. When I went to try and fix that by EQing the mic on the guitar amp, it wasn't that one at all, it was actually the vocal mic.
So you have to hunt it down. And with one mic, you know where it's coming from. With two or three or four, every time there's a little issue, you've got to basically mute them all and start again to find out where the offending frequency, otherwise you could reach for the EQ that you think it is. and and wreck the sound that you've just spent 10 minutes putting together so that's the downside but um hopefully that the more mics we're adding hopefully we're getting a fuller sound but um i've got to say that one mic setup was sounding pretty good so we shall see we'll see how that goes I think any artist who wants to work in this kind of environment has to be a good performer.
I think that's the bottom line. Also I think it helps massively if they've spent a lot of time performing at an acoustic level. I think a lot of people struggle. They may do 200 gigs a year, but through pieces.
systems and they very rarely hear themselves unprocessed. Singers who really have only ever heard their own voice with pop dust on it. You know, they're the people that will struggle.
I think a good performers who can play at an acoustic level would absolutely love this environment. I mean I think if you're in a jazz trio for instance, that's a self-mixing thing. If you're doing acoustic blues, that's a self-mixing thing.
If you're a singer-songwriter, that's a self-mixing thing. There's no There's no reason why all those types of artists wouldn't thrive in this environment. And it's not just because those genres might not be what you would call classic 50s genres.
To me it doesn't really matter. If they want it to sound really kind of human and warm and immediate, then they would be fine. When all this equipment was coming through, it was the same time that music was changing, so it was like it happened at the same time.
I think for me, having worked here, the thing that has clearly changed is that in the early 50s, bass players would have been used to not being amplified. They would be very good at getting a lot of sound out of an acoustic bass. They might put themselves in a corner in a studio so that you get more bass out of it. They might.
They'd find all sorts of clever clever ways of getting more bass. Drummers would be really clever at playing quietly, so they might be really good with brushes, or they might be great swing drummers who had a light touch but could play quietly but still in an exciting way. I think a lot of those skills possibly have been lost because people now have everything amplified. So there's no, particularly for bass, there's no reason for guys to play. play like that anymore, they just plug in.
I think a studio like this it would be very easy to look at it and say well obviously this is set up for doing mid-fifties rock and roll and rockabilly. That's not actually the way I look at it at all. For me it's the sound that it creates and I actually think it's probably more relevant today than it has been since it was in its heyday. For two reasons, first of all I think people are interested in idiosyncratic music recording and things actually starting to sound different. Anything that requires a sort of direct honesty like singer-songwriter stuff, anything done with acoustic instruments, bluegrass, jazz, blues, for me would sound great in here because of the signal path, because as long as the performer is good, using this equipment has a way of bringing that out in a way I don't find as easy.
easy with modern equipment. And secondly, I think because we've got Pro Tools now, or whatever, we've got computerized fix-it technology and de-hisses and all that kind of thing. A lot of the disadvantages of this equipment has been taken care of.
So you can record onto the quarter-inch mono tape, and then with whatever software you choose to use, you can remove the hiss. So it's kind of become relevant again. You know, I can have a band in, I could tempo map a performance, and you could have a vintage recording, and then add other arrangements and overdubs. When we recorded the album ourselves, that didn't feel like gigging at all. That was recording an album.
Here, it felt very much as it does when we gig, to be honest. It's live, isn't it? I mean, when we're playing live, we're playing live.
And when we're recording here, we're recording live. So it's as close to, I guess, the live experience as we could possibly get, I think. I was most amazed, actually, about how much I could hear.
I expected not having headphones on, not having absolutely my own mic, and not having absolutely the mix that I needed in my ears, I would find it. quite difficult to record but actually it was remarkably simple. I mean very very nice experience.
I was gonna say my favorite I think it's my favorite because the first one that we did and because I was just staggered by the fact that you could hear everything with such clarity from one mic but I need to have a good listen to the other ones first but yeah I mean the one mic one is crazy. How can that possibly work? I can't even begin to imagine.
The experience of recording everything together and live is just beautiful. It's the way this music is supposed to be recorded. It's so brilliant. Basically I'd like to live here. look at it, you'd never need to go out would you?
Well I thought it was really interesting and it's not something that we'd have the opportunity to do often because it's the same band so you do have a direct comparison, the same instruments and everything. I think I wasn't massively surprised that the one mic setup was probably my favourite sound, largely because it's such a great mic but also Clearly there's no phase issues going on with that and you can kind of hear that in it. It's although the individual instruments like the drums and the electric guitar are obviously more ambient, they're still really clear.
When we went to two mics and to a certain extent to three, they were still ambient in the same sort of way, but they weren't as clear, to my ears anyway. When we got to four mics, all of that was fixed because then we had a drier signal of everything. By the time we got to that stage, we were more in a, to me, it felt more in a late 50s, 60s kind of area, where sonically it was probably better, but I still preferred the first one in a way.
I think it would be completely different if it wasn't such a great mic. I mean, it's not, well, for starters, it's an extremely old mic, but to find a mic, that mic of that age, but in that condition is astonishing. I mean, what you can hear with it.
it does, I mean it just does the job doesn't it? I couldn't believe how close the drums sounded on that one mic thing. They were the other side of the room and you could hear the snare like it was right next to you.
Really cool. When we added more mics in we were able to isolate the double bass to a greater extent, but again that brings its own problems and I think I said that earlier, that when you're using a ribbon mic with a double bass. where you've got a microphone which characteristically has a lot of proximity effect to an instrument that has a fairly unpredictable output of sub frequencies depending on which notes being played. You know there's a point, there's a sweet spot if you go too close you're just gonna you just distort the microphone on some notes but not others which can be a horrible surprise when you're halfway through the track and you and they suddenly hit the treble note or you back it off so far that there's kind of no point of it even being there and all you're you're doing is creating a phase issue with what's leaking out into the vocal mic and whatnot. So yeah, it's better but it presents another challenge.
The dead zones are, yeah, they're everything really and it's not that there's less coming through. If you position them just right absolutely nothing is coming through. Now the three mic setup we had it a guitar acoustic guitar right up to the ribbon mic but on its dead spot. and you would have expected there to be a problem with that and there was no problem at all.
It was astonishing and you can get great separation just by the use and the thought of how you're going to place the people and the microphones. We've done the music today that was coming out when this gear was in its heyday and that all fits together and you can see how that immediately meshes. For current music and for the future, I think the qualities that this approach brings is just... is just as, and potentially even more important, because there's an element with modern music that it all sort of sounds the same to an extent, because people are often working towards a similar sonic goal where they want it to sound like a pop hit or they want it to sound like a super clean jazz record or whatever. And in the pursuit of that sort of sonic benchmark, we're losing idiosyncratic recording and individuality and all that kind of thing.
I think if a... singer-songwriter came in here or a country band or a bluegrass band or a blues artist or a jazz artist they would they would absolutely see their songs come to life not necessarily in the way they expected but I think they would be able to communicate really effectively with their audience because of the simplicity of the of the signal chain that the quality that it brings the fact that it It doesn't bring anything that's hyped or unreal in any way. You know, there's no falsely bright top end or anything like that. And there's no, you know, insanely powerful bass. It's just the song.
And you can hear... With this gear you get the song and I think that's why it's really relevant And also secondly because we do have Pro Tools and all modern stuff It can really easily integrate with with that as well. So yeah, I think it's potentially quite exciting It is a niche market. Of course it is. I mean I can't see hip-hop garage bands Coming to record in my studio.
But then having said that I think that a lot of people are thinking Is this really music anymore? or is this just a device that makes someone sound good? So I think the interest, there's a backlash now kind of with people interested in knowing, well, how did they used to record many years ago?
Coming into this environment from being a sort of conventional recording guy, it has made me much more focused upon what's happening in the live space. I spend a lot more time getting the signal right on the way in than I used to. I think it's...
is the easiest thing and we've all done it where you have someone and you know you can fix what they've just done and we've all been tempted to comp a take because we know that there are parts of it that we can repair. I don't really do that anymore. I kind of make people go back and do it again.
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Just to watch her do the boppin'when the music gets loud. Crazy legs, crazy legs, boppin'all over the floor. Do the bop, crazy legs.