Stereo Music Recording Technique......
It's always been interesting to me that the beginnings of stereo music recording technique developed as kind of an 'underground', almost 'guerilla' effort, by the more progressive engineers and producers that were thinking 'Stereo' at that time.
Because of the reluctance of the major record company moguls to acknowledge the importance of stereophonic recording of music, and the hesitation of the folks that held the 'purse-strings' to pay for the additional reels of recording tape, the future of stereo music recording came very close to being a strangled 'baby' before it was out of the crib. Those of us that were interested in the future of stereo recording of music proceeded totally on speculation. We volunteered our efforts and the studios donated the tape to record many of these incredible musical performances in stereo. This speculation paid off in later years when many of those recordings have been re-released in stereo, often from tapes from the private collections of people such as myself.
One of the biggest problems for studios was that the control rooms that were designed in the 1930's and the 1940's were designed only for monaural recording and thus were very small. United Recording Studios in Hollywood was one of the first studios with control rooms designed expressly for the recording of stereo music product.
United Recording Studios in Hollywood were designed and built by my mentor, the brilliant engineer, Milton T. “Bill” Putnam. The Capitol Tower studios were completed shortly before the issue of larger stereo control rooms was settled. Those control rooms were re-configured and remodeled in late 1959 to accommodate the new stereo techniques.
I think I was kind of a rebel. I was very young at that moment in the industry, and I wanted to experiment with stereo. I knew there was something truly new and innovative. In my soul I knew that really good stereo music reproduction wasn't merely one sound source coming out of one speaker, and a different sound source coming out of the other speaker. My heart told me that there was far more to the adventure of high-quality music reproduction than just that.
I have always felt that we can reproduce the sound of music plus the feeling of music, more emotionally by using good stereo recording technique. But at that point in time, the people...the recording industry executives, really didn't want to hear about it. The people that ran the record companies at that time, didn't think there was much of a future in stereo. I remember one guy(I won't name him, he was a big executive with a major label). He said that, “Stereo was to him, like taking a shower with two shower heads... and you wouldn’t take a shower with two shower heads would you???...ha! ha! ha!. Shows you what small thinkers thery were.
They had so little trust in the future of stereo, that they wouldn't even pay for the tape or the extra stereo tape machine to record those priceless musical performances in stereo.
So I did it on my own.(A few other engineers at that time did the same thing.) We built a separate control room just for stereo. And we had to disguise it. We set up the separate control room for stereo in the back part of the studio complex, so that the record moguls wouldn't see the stereo machines and think they were paying for extra tape, or machines, and go crazy on us. Even with this bold guerilla effort on the part of a few, think of all the beautiful stereo recordings that vanished into thin air, because of small thinking on the part of the narrow-minded people that held the purse strings of the business!
What is Stereo To Me?
I don’t think I have ever seen a really good definition of what stereo music reproduction actually is. If we attempt to precisely define the word “stereophonic” , we find in the dictionary that the first half of the word, “stereo” means, solid, firm or three-dimensional. The second half of the word or, “Phonic” means pertaining to the nature of sound. I think that may be as close as we get to a definition of stereo music reproduction. I think a real definition of stereophonic should say that “Stereophonic sound is a reproduction system consisting of two or more microphones, placed in front of a sound pick-up area, recorded discretely on two or more channels of a multi-track recording device, and then played back on two or more loudspeakers placed in front of a listening area.”
This system creates the illusion of the recorded sound having direction, position and depth in the area between the loudspeakers. This playback system produces a sound pattern at the listeners ears which our hearing sense interprets as indicating direction and depth of sound field in the limited area between the loudspeakers.
In most cases, accurate localization is the goal of a stereophonic image. In other words, when recording a large orchestra, the instruments in the center of the ensemble are accurately reproduced in the area midway between the two playback loudspeakers. Instruments at the sides of the orchestra are reproduced from either the left or the right speaker. Instruments half way between are reproduced halfway to one side and so on... This type of a stereo image is what I would call “Basically - an unaltered acoustical event”.
For me, the problem is that this technique totally eliminates “Sonic Fantasy” from the recording process. It is the clinical approach. I find it somewhat interesting, but not very inspiring. Things got really exciting for me when I discovered that I could successfully record sonic images that existed mainly in my imagination.
In other words, Since the middle 1960’s I think my philosphical approach to using the "Stereo Space", has been to take the listener into a “New Reality” that did not, or could not, exist in a real life acoustical environment. This “New Reality”, of course, existed only in my own imagination.
Don't try to think out these Stereo Images too much.
DO NOT use any form of room calculation when you position your mikes in stereo,!!!
Your ears will tell you if there are phase problems.....
Do you use phase alignment tools? NO!!!!! (That's a lie, I always have an oscilloscope on the Stereo Buss.... But that's all!!!)
Bruce Swedien
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