Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Learning to live with recording
- A short take in praise of long takes
- 1 Performing for (and against) the microphone
- Producing a credible vocal
- ‘It could have happened’: The evolution of music construction
- 2 Recording practices and the role of the producer
- Still small voices
- Broadening horizons: ‘Performance’ in the studio
- 3 Getting sounds: The art of sound engineering
- Limitations and creativity in recording and performance
- Records and recordings in post-punk England, 1978–80
- 4 The politics of the recording studio: A case study from South Africa
- From Lanza to Lassus
- 5 From wind-up to iPod: Techno-cultures of listening
- A matter of circumstance: On experiencing recordings
- 6 Selling sounds: Recordings and the record business
- Revisiting concert life in the mid-century: The survival of acetate discs
- 7 The development of recording technologies
- Raiders of the lost archive
- The original cast recording of West Side Story
- 8 The recorded document: Interpretation and discography
- One man's approach to remastering
- Technology, the studio, music
- Reminder: A recording is not a performance
- 9 Methods for analysing recordings
- 10 Recordings and histories of performance style
- Recreating history: A clarinettist's retrospective
- 11 Going critical: Writing about recordings
- Something in the air
- Afterword: Recording: From reproduction to representation to remediation
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Discography
- Index
Technology, the studio, music
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 September 2011
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Learning to live with recording
- A short take in praise of long takes
- 1 Performing for (and against) the microphone
- Producing a credible vocal
- ‘It could have happened’: The evolution of music construction
- 2 Recording practices and the role of the producer
- Still small voices
- Broadening horizons: ‘Performance’ in the studio
- 3 Getting sounds: The art of sound engineering
- Limitations and creativity in recording and performance
- Records and recordings in post-punk England, 1978–80
- 4 The politics of the recording studio: A case study from South Africa
- From Lanza to Lassus
- 5 From wind-up to iPod: Techno-cultures of listening
- A matter of circumstance: On experiencing recordings
- 6 Selling sounds: Recordings and the record business
- Revisiting concert life in the mid-century: The survival of acetate discs
- 7 The development of recording technologies
- Raiders of the lost archive
- The original cast recording of West Side Story
- 8 The recorded document: Interpretation and discography
- One man's approach to remastering
- Technology, the studio, music
- Reminder: A recording is not a performance
- 9 Methods for analysing recordings
- 10 Recordings and histories of performance style
- Recreating history: A clarinettist's retrospective
- 11 Going critical: Writing about recordings
- Something in the air
- Afterword: Recording: From reproduction to representation to remediation
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Discography
- Index
Summary
It goes without saying that there have been huge changes in studio technology over the last forty years – but what's interesting is how at every stage in this evolution there has been a need to improvise with whatever the current technology provides. Pink Floyd's music has always made use of all kinds of what might be called ‘environmental sounds’, and EMI had their own enormous library of sound effects on tape as well as the commercially available vinyl discs of sound effects. But often the quality simply wasn't good enough to take them off a vinyl record, and sometimes the specific sounds required weren't available, so we'd have to find our own ways to make or find the sounds. Examples would be the sound of footsteps for the 1973 album Dark Side of the Moon, recorded in the Abbey Road echo chamber; or the clock sounds, for which Alan Parsons, the engineer on that album, went out to a clock shop – in Islington I seem to remember – and recorded a lot of chiming and ticking and so on. Those were relatively straightforward, but when Roger Waters and I were doing the track ‘Money’, we ended up assembling a bunch of coins and drilling holes in them so that they could be dangled on strings in order to achieve the right sort of coin-jingling sound.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music , pp. 214 - 216Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009