Ampex 1000 Machine
Pic: John Sayers

 

HISTORY OF RECORDING

 

In the beginning there was ‘rote’, where music was ‘handed down’ from parent to sibling. Most traditional music was learnt this way, often in the form of singing. Tunes on the fiddle (violin), airs on the accordion, etc., were stored (recorded) in memory through the generations. Prior to the 15th century, music notation was written by hand and stored in manuscripts or large volumes. With the invention of the printing press, sheet music became commonplace and still survives to this day. This was how music was recorded until the great invention of the wax cylinder and then later, wire recorder and finally magnetic tape, recordings were like snap-shots in time, much like a camera captures the moment. These were said to be “live” performances whether in the studio or on location. Every instrument or singer had to be present to perform together producing the full arrangement of sounds in one take.


Les Paul, the famous electric guitarist is credited with the invention of the multi-track recorder. He did this first on wax disks, recording “Lover (When you’re near me)”, Capitol Records 1947, which featured eight different guitar parts all played by himself and built up layer upon layer from one wax disk to another. Later, he continued this process, utilising reel-to-reel audio tape recording invented by Jack Mullin of the Ampex company. Les Paul with wife Mary Ford, had a number of hits using the first commercially available audio magnetic tape recorder, Ampex model 200. With this machine, Les Paul developed the technology further, adding an additional record head and some circuitry, allowing multiple tracks to be recorded separately and asynchronously on the same tape. In 1954 he commissioned AMPEX to build the first 8 track tape recorder. His idea, known as "Sel-Sync" (Selective Synchronous) used a modified recording head, which could record a new track and play back a previously recorded one simultaneously. This became the norm for tape-based multi-track recording. Now musicians could be ‘overdubbed’ one at a time, recorded days, weeks or sometimes months apart. This jigsaw-like process has become the backbone of modern production. The availability of ‘editing’ within today’s Digital Audio Worstations (DAW’s), has made for a less ‘spontaneous’ music…some would say!


In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, Digital Audio came about. The first recorders were 2 track reel-to-reel machines looking much like their analogue counterparts. They used a process called PCM (Pulse-Code-Modulation) where the analogue waveform is sampled at regular time intervals and then converted to a binary stream. The device that performed this magic is known as an ADC (Analogue-to-digital converter). Multi-track versions soon followed by companies such as 3M and Mitsubishi. CD’s (Compact Disc’s) were issued and tape and vinyl slowly died off, although there are still a few Luddites out there.


Digital audio is described as having a sampling rate and a known bit rate. For example, CD’s have a sampling rate of 44.1khz (44100 Hertz) and a 16 bit resolution for stereo. CD players had a similar device built-in known as a DAC ( Digital-to-Analogue converter) which does the opposite of the ADC described above. Cheaper systems came into being with DAT (Digital Audio Tape). These 2 track rotating-head machines ran at 44.1/48khz, 16 bit. There soon followed 8 track machines manufactured by companies such as Tascam and Alesis, utilizing VHS tapes. Multiples of these were run together to achieve the 24 or 32 track recordings we had become so familiar with.


Since the digital signal is a binary stream, it can be stored on computer hard-drives, hence the DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), a software/hardware system where the signal is represented as an onscreen waveform. It’s adjustable in every possible way, moveable, editable, cut and pasteable, you can stick at it until you are entirely satisfied with every aspect of the performance as well as the sound. A dream come true for some. With audio data compression techniques, digital audio can be stored on Smartcards, Compact Flash Disks or any digital data storage medium, bringing about small portable music players (MP3 players) like iPod etc. Music is with us wherever we go, even in our Mobile phones. Conversion from analogue to digital and back again has made this possible. This is where we currently sit today.