I’m pretty sure that everyone knows that I am obsessed with music. In class we’ve had a couple of “History Of Mixing” classes and here are a couple of interesting (to me) things that I learned.
-On the Rolling Stones “Honky Tonk Women” final product, the scratch vocal was used instead of the final overdubs.
-The Beatles ‘Sgt. Pepper’ album was recorded at a tape speed of 7.5ips onto a 4 tape. The industry standard is 30 inches per second.
-The first instance of artificially induced reverb was on a track called “Peg O My Heart” by the Harmonicats. The engineer, Bill Putnam, recorded the song and then took a split from his console into a speaker that he had placed in a bathroom (the first echo chamber) and then rerecorded the song being played through the speaker. Incredible. No one had ever heard anything like that on a recording before. Before that, most recordings didn’t have reverb because they were intended for playback in large dancing halls which had enough natural reverb.

On two shellac 7″s (one pictured above) instead of writing out the lyrics to their songs or having pictures of themselves, they listed the microphones, tape machines and magnetic tape used during the session. These guys are awesome. These five particular songs are also recorded electrically with no overdubs, mastered entirely in the analog domain directly to metal. I love this band.

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