There are many arguments both for and against the home recording, digital recording revolution. I've heard most of them and they both have their points, though every opinion is just that, because ultimately music is music and a recording is just the style of documenting music. A crappy recording will still convey information almost as well as a great recording.
And with the onslaught of everyone, and their mother, having Pro Tools and booking time in the spare bedroom, I continue to try and learn about what makes a recording great.
Before the days of digital compression, internet forum interns, MP3s going to the mastering house and assistants who refuse to patch in a real 1176 because "the plugin sounds just as good". In the days when you actually had to KNOW about electrical engineering to engineer. Even before the rise of the cassette tape...
All the way back to where the modern recording studio started.
People like Bill Putnam Sr. were running the show.
As the founder of Universal Audio, UREI and other successful companies, his studio circuit designs AND recordings as engineer are still among the most highly regarded.
This story is one inspiration I found to build my own studio gear.
Here is some excerpts from the History of Universal Audio:
..."We had gone in to record with Bill, and Bill had everything set up" recalls Murray Allen, then a member of Kenton's band and the man who would one day own
Universal Recording. "Kenton called in to Bill, 'Bill, how's everything in there?' and Bill replied, 'Everything's perfect until the music starts.'"
Thus began an association that would last until Kenton's death. These two mavericks were perfectly suited for each other. For these sessions, Putnam wanted the sound to be as fresh and bold as Kenton's arrangements. So he began to address several aspects that would have profound effects on how records sound.
Putnam devised a band shell for strings that was a mainstay for almost two decades. In addition, he built a drum shed for the isolation of drums to be used for the Kenton recordings. He conducted the first 8-track experiments, which featured a staggered head with a signal-to-noise ratio of 30 dB. But most significantly, perhaps, was the creation of another "home brew": a custom console, complete with rotary faders, 12 inputs, preamps and dedicated echo sends....
....Putnam, who had been recently divorced from his first wife, was suddenly in sync on every level of his new West Coast life. Demonstrating how a recording facility could be built and run, he'd gone head-to-head with Radio Recorders, the biggest independent studio in Los Angeles, and won. He finally found a woman who "understood what my business was about and what I was about." (They married and produced two children, Bill Jr. and Jim, both of whom would continue the Universal brand to the present day.) And, he was making cool records. Examples of Putnam and Sinatra collaborations at United/Western include Sinatra: Basie and Sinatra & Strings. They're textbooks on how strings, horns, brass, rhythm and vocal should be laid down....
...Talk about shrewd. In the early '60s, stereo was roughly at the same evolutionary spot where 5.1 is today. Label owners finally got hip to marketing and releasing stereo product, except that they had none. Or did they? Like Swedien, Ramone and Tom Dowd, Putnam had surreptitiously been running simultaneous stereo mixes along with the expected mono masters for a couple of years. When the labels got wind of this, they offered to pay for the tape. No dice, said Putnam. "However, I will let you pay me for the studio time."...
For more on Bill Putnam Sr. and the history of Universal Audio, check out these links:
Bill Putnam Story 1
Bill Putnam Story 2
