alantig
Zombie Four, DFZ
- Joined
- Apr 28, 2012
- Messages
- 15,436
This covers all the big hitters you'd expect - Abbey Road, Trident, Olympic, etc., but also a lot of smaller studios as well. Lots of stories about recording sessions. Tons of pics and drawings of studio layouts. The author even includes lists of staffs for some positions. It was really interesting to me (even though I had seen pictures before) to see the Abbey Road (and other studio) engineers wearing their lab coats during sessions. It was even more interesting to me to read about how the bands had to actually move to other studios to drive some of the more established studios out of their fixed ways. There was a story about Alan Parsons working one session (the band's name and the studio elude me at the moment) where he asked for all 24 Dolby units, then 24 patch cords. Turns out he was daisy-chaining them (the engineer says Dolby would have freaked if he'd known) to get a distinctive hand-clap sound.
What's neat from a technical point of view is how much stuff was invented on the fly because someone needed something to make a sound. So much of what we take for granted these days that just didn't exist or had to be done by hand - not editing, but things like flanging, compression, etc.
Maybe my perspective is a tad skewed because I love that behind the scenes stuff, but I'm glad someone on another board recommended this book.
