The Recording Studio – The Heart of Music Production

Recording Studio Stuff

The studio is the center of music production because of one idea: put the sound in a controlled room and capture it with equipment that does something useful with it. That equipment has changed enormously. This post is a quick timeline, built from Wikipedia’s articles on the history of sound recording, recording studios, home recording and Pro Tools.

I have kept to dates that those articles give. Where I draw a conclusion myself, I say so.

1877 to the early 1920s: the horn and the needle

Wikipedia says the first practical sound recording and reproduction device was the mechanical phonograph cylinder, invented by Thomas Edison in 1877 and patented in 1878. The gramophone disc, generally credited to Emile Berliner and patented in 1887, followed, and by the end of World War I the disc had become the dominant commercial format.

An early phonograph with a big flower-painted horn on a small round table

Image: An early phonograph with a large horn, Deaf Smith County Museum, Hereford, Texas by Billy Hathorn, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Recording at that stage was purely mechanical, with no amplification, until the 1920s. The article notes that these acoustic methods had limited sensitivity and frequency range. Very low and very high notes could not be recorded, and the violin was hard to transfer to disc, which is why some players used a Stroh violin with a built-in horn.

The 1920s: microphones and electrical recording

Wikipedia calls electrical recording, in which a microphone turns sound into an electrical signal that is amplified and drives the recording stylus, arguably the most important milestone between the phonograph in 1877 and the first commercial digital recordings in the early 1970s. The first electrical recording issued to the public, it says, was the funeral service for The Unknown Warrior at Westminster Abbey on November 11, 1920. Victor and Columbia licensed Western Electric’s system and made their first published electrical recordings in February 1925.

The late 1940s and 1950s: tape and multitrack

The article says Ampex launched the first commercial tape recorder, the model 200, in 1948. Within a few years, American musician Les Paul invented the first multitrack tape recorder, and Wikipedia gives his 1951 recording of “How High the Moon”, with eight overdubbed guitar tracks, as an early example of what tape allowed. By the early 1950s, most commercial recordings were mastered on tape and not cut directly to disc.

Wikipedia’s recording studio article adds numbers for multitrack: 8 tracks in the 1950s, 16 in 1968 and 32 in the 1970s, with 2-inch tape holding up to 24 tracks. It says that from the 1970s the emphasis shifted to isolation and soundproofing, with echo and reverb added separately in the mix. Multitrack changed the studio’s layout as much as its equipment.

The 1960s: headphones and creative studio work

The same article says it was not until the 1960s, with high-fidelity headphones, that performers commonly monitored themselves on headphones while recording. It also says engineers in the 1960s began placing microphones much closer to instruments than before, and credits that with the rasping horn sound on the Beatles’ “Good Morning Good Morning” and “Lady Madonna”.

A large analog mixing console with a long row of faders in front of three studio monitors and a screen

Image: A large analog mixing console in a studio control room by Cashlee69, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The late 1970s to 1990s: small, then digital

Wikipedia’s home recording article says that until the late 1970s, music could only be recorded on low-quality tape recorders or on large and expensive reel-to-reel machines, and that Tascam’s Portastudio, a four-track machine for the consumer market, arrived in 1979. The compact disc followed in 1982. The recording studio article says digital recording on ADAT and its low cost were largely responsible for the rise of project studios in the 1990s. Pro Tools, now one of the best-known DAWs, launched its first system on June 5, 1991, according to Wikipedia.

What this timeline means

These are my own observations, not claims from the articles.

  • The room has outlasted most of the machines. The horn, cylinder and tape machine each came and went, but the idea of a quiet room, a microphone and a control position did not.
  • Each technology moved a job. Tape moved performance decisions into the mix, headphones moved the band into separate rooms, and the DAW moved everything onto a computer.
  • Today’s DAW is the old studio in software. Wikipedia’s Pro Tools article says DAWs can perform the functions of a multitrack tape recorder and a mixing console, plus things only possible digitally, such as non-destructive editing.

If you want to see how a modern recording workflow works, the series post DAWs and the Recording Workflow: Tracking, Editing and Comping picks up where this timeline stops.

Sources