What exactly were the advances in recording and amplification technology that made music get heavy in 1968?

Histories of the origins of metal often touch on this, but just barely. I've never seen a real account of what exactly it was that suddenly expanded the dynamic possibilities of rock. It just seemed that pretty suddenly in 1968, drum kits expanded and were amplified to go boom rather than rat-a-tat, and you could actually hear the bass. Heaviness wasn't completely absent in 1967, there was Hendrix for example. Obviously not everyone got heavy, but even with the Stones had a fuller sound on Beggars Banquet than their 1967 stuff. Even the Kinks expanded their sound. This also brings up the chicken or egg question. Would some of these artists have sounded heavier before 1968 if they could? Or did it not occur to anyone until Hendrix and Blue Cheer raised the bar? Plenty didn't take advantage of these advances, of course, like Jefferson Airplane.

The Beatles - "Revolution" (single version) & "Helter Skelter"
Iron Butterfly - "In A Gadda Da Vida"
Led Zeppelin I
Jeff Beck - Truth
Blue Cheer - Vincebus Eruptum
The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Electric Ladyland
Free - Tons Of Sobs
Cream - Wheels Of Fire
Traffic
The Rolling Stones - Beggars Banquet

um, records were plenty heavy before 1968.

the invention of the 1176

Um, like what? The Who, Kinks, Small Faces, etc. made some pretty loud records, mainly due to guitar distortion, but don't have the heavy low end.

The Universal Audio 1176 Compressor? Tell us more?

In early 1963, The Kingsmen, a band based in the U.S. state of Oregon, became famous for the song "Louie, Louie". The song made The Kingsmen household names as it progressed up the charts. With a hit single under their belts, The Kingsmen soon embarked on a fifty-state national tour. Because the band was used to playing small hops and school dances, many of the members found themselves ill-equipped with the amplifiers that they were currently using. Bassist Norm Sundholm discovered that his bass amp was not nearly powerful enough to play larger concert halls. Sundholm enlisted the help of his brother Conrad to help solve his problem. By 1964, the Sundholm brothers had designed the world's first high powered concert bass amplifier. By 1965, the demand for Sundholm's amplifiers had increased to the point where the family garage could no longer be used as the manufacturing facility. Thus, the Sunn Musical Equipment Company was born.

i was being a little flippant but it was introduced in '68 and is tremendous for beefin' up yr drums/bass/gts

possibly just a coincidence

xpost

I'd always believed it was because of Marshall Amps and the need for volume as the crowds got bigger. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Amplification ">=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Amplification

Marshall is definitely part of the amplification equation.

"In the early-mid 1960s, Pete Townshend and John Entwistle of The Who were directly responsible for the creation and widespread use of stacked Marshall cabinets. Pete later remarked that John started using Marshall Stacks in order to hear himself over Keith Moon's drums and Townshend himself also had to use them just to be heard over John. In fact, the very first 100 watt Marshall Amps were created specifically for Entwistle and Townshend when they were looking to replace some equipment that had been stolen from them. They approached Jim Marshall asking if it would be possible for him to make their new rigs more powerful than those they had lost, to which they were told that the cabinets would have to double in size. They agreed and six rigs of this prototype were manufactured, of which two each were given to Townshend and Entwistle and one each to Ronnie Lane and Steve Marriott of The Small Faces. These new "double" cabinets (each containing 8 speakers) proved too heavy and awkward to be transported practically, so The Who returned to Marshall asking if they could be cut in half and stacked, and although the double cabinets were left intact, the existing single cabinet models (each containing 4 speakers) were modified for stacking, which has become the norm for years to follow.[8]

Entwistle and Townshend both continued expanding and experimenting with their rigs, until (at a time when most bands still used 50 to 100W amps with single cabinets) they were both using twin Stacks, with each Stack powered by new experimental prototype 200W amps, each connected to the guitar via a Y-splitter. This, in turn, also had a strong influence on the band's contemporaries at the time, with Cream, The Jimi Hendrix Experience and Led Zeppelin following suit. However, due to the cost of transport, The Who could not afford to take their full rigs with them for their earliest overseas tours, thus Cream and Hendrix were the first to be seen to use this setup on a wide scale, particularly in America."

Pretty certain Marshalls were the main difference, yes.

except the thread is mainly about low ends and drums, no ?
I totally agree with this. like, I don't think I know something as heavy and deep as the bass drum on jumpin jack flash that predates that song by more than a year, for instance.

Did it achieve total heaviosity?

"I don't think I know something as heavy and deep as the bass drum on jumpin jack flash that predates that song by more than a year, for instance."

this is crazy and sad. any one of a thousand R&B (or rock or jazz or blues) 78s from the 50's makes a Led Zeppelin or Stones record sound like the softest of marshmallow pillows. hell, i've got 45s that make led zep sound like fluff. lots of them. you want drums that will crush your skull? listen to a 78 of Elvis's Hound Dog.

don't even get me started on classical music.

also, get one 1965 Sonics debut album.

1968 was kind of the beginning of the end for great HEAVY sound on record. longer album sides, thinner, cheaper vinyl, more fanciful and twee recording techniques, etc..

Whoa whoa whaidaminit:

Sunn, as in amplifiers, came out of the Kingsmen, and Louie Louie?

i'm gonna dine out on that piece of trivia for months

Hahah I was thinking the same thing.

xxxposts

hum, I have some sonics but don't remember it sounding very heavy. I've got to listen more carefully to these (but frankly, the kick drum on "hound dog" doesn't seem very heavy to me).

You're speaking more about sound reproduction than the recording, Scott, right?

I have no doubt that the 78-rpm pressing of Introducing the Sonics is heavier than the CD!

The last two on the list were produced by Jimmy Miller. The Stones hired him after hearing Traffic's 1st LP. I think that the "bass you can actually hear" part might be attributed to him.

I think the question of what versions of recordings people are listening to is a big one. Dodgy late 80s CD reissues are not gonna be heavy at all.

Sunn, as in amplifiers, came out of the Kingsmen, and Louie Louie?

marshall obv a critical force in the history of loud/heavy but sunn was important in the US. in the 50s and early 60s touring rock bassists would often get run into a guitar amp, and sometimes had to share a two channel amp with the rhythm guitarist. ampeg and fender had bass amps but nothing particularly beefy at that point. norm sundholm from the kingsmen got sick of never being heard and had his brother conrad wire up a monstrous bass stack for him. once that happened the arms race was on. once the bass wattage went up, the guitar amps got louder, then drummers needed to get louder so their kits got bigger, etc.

fo sho. see the difference in bass sound between any prince lp and cd.

all i'm saying is i could play you some soul singles from the early 60's that would knock your friggin' ears off. WAY louder and more dynamic than any rock record post-1967. don't get me wrong, blue cheer records are way loud via distortion and feedback, but....seriously, get one of yer audiophile freak friends to play you some choice 78s and you will be stunned by the sheer physical presence of sound in the room. "heavy" is in the eye of the beholder, but as far as i'm concerned, records just got less awe-inspiring as time went on.

and "hound dog" drums on 78 sound like friggin' napalm friggin' death circa 1956, i kid you not!

78 Collectors: Why are they so weird?

j/k u know I love u scott

it's interesting to read about how much the who influenced marshall design

GW: You introduced the first Marshall 4x12 cabinet into the Who.

Entwistle: Yeah, but I didn’t buy the very first one. It was a guy in a band called the Flintstones who got that. I bought the second one...and the fourth, and the seventh, and the eight. Pete bought the ones in between. It was great. I’d buy one, he’d buy one, I’d buy one, then he’d buy another. And I went, “is it loud enough? Fuck, I’ll buy two more.” And I started using the two-amp system — bi-amping. Then we had a period where we switched to Vox equipment because we figured it would be louder. But it wasn’t. It just blew up. So we’d always been trying to convince Marshall to make us a 100-watt amp. They told us it would be impossible: the amp would be too heavy to carry around. We said, “Put a handle on each end.”

GP: What type of amplifier and guitar were you using when the Who first formed?

Entwistle: When we first started calling ourselves the Who I used a Marshall 50 watt amp with a 4-12 cabinet. I had the first 4-12 cabinet that Marshall made. We more or less forced them to make 100 watt amps by changing to Vox, who already had one out. Marshall decided that if they were going to keep us, they’d have to make a 100 watt amp. They used to make their amps with speaker material on the front, and they looked completely different. I said, “I don’t like that; I want it all black,” so they changed them.

entwistle: the first marshall logo had a block font. fuck off I told them, we want it in script!

hum. I'd be curious to hear these 78... but I have no idea where/how ! I'll see if I find some 78 freak around...

Agree that there were some very heavy sounds prior to '68. What's always puzzled my is how thin and tinny a lot of early 70's rock sounds. MC5's 'Back in the USA' is the example that springs to mind, plus a lot of early glam. (Incidentally, I'm not saying the MC5 record is bad, it just doesn't have the same push as the other rekkids.)

Was this through the principle of mixing stuff for cheap car radios? Or have I just heard a lot of really lousy CD reissues?

78 Collectors: Why are they so weird?

uh

cool reminiscence from conrad sundholm

My brother Norm was working at a music store in Portland, OR and making mods to Fender sealed cabinets by porting them and selling them with 60 Bogen PA amplifiers. I helped him with the port size and tuning.

The very first cabinets under the Sunn name were dual 15" JBL D130's mounted in a 24 wide cabinet with the 15's staggered with two ports next to the staggered 15's. I borrowed $1300 from the Portland Teachers Credit Union (I was teaching at Centennial High School at the time) to purchase plywood, vinyl and JBL speakers. I swung a deal with a local dealer to purchase 12 JBL D130's at below retail. The rep for JBL canceled him as a JBL dealer because he violated JBL's "fair trade" agreement then immediately looked us up and wanted to set us up as an OEM account purchasing direct from JBL. I thought that was pretty hilarious at the time, but felt bad for the retailer who was trying to help us out. I didn't find out about it for a year or so.

Anyway, it took me six months to sell those first 6 cabinets. Then I had a dream about how to build a bass cabinet. The dream was so vivid I got up the next morning and started building the cabinet. It was a rear loading bass reflex design which became the 200S bass cabinet. This particular unit contained extra bracing which was not included in the eventual production version. I then built a piggyback head enclosure and stuffed it with a Dynaco Mark II 60 watt tube kit I built along with a Dynaco tube preamp. This was Norm's first unit he used on the road with the Kingsmen.

It had so much low end! Almost too much. The electronic response curves were for HiFi not bass guitars but it out performed anything on the market. As Norm traveled across the country playing this monster, everyone was asking him were he got this amp. He told them to ask their local music dealer to call me and order one for them. I started getting calls from Jacksonville, FL; Boston, MA etc. - These dealers were ordering 12 at a time - the rest is history.

Then I had a dream about how to build a bass cabinet.

^ love this

I love how threads like this + Google = hitherto undiscovered treasure

http://westernswing78.blogspot.com/

back in the usa's thinness is the result of landau damage, or so the legend goes

i have an original German pressing of back in the u.s.a. that sounds great. the guitars, especially.

Just because bands were using big stacks in live performance doesn't mean they were using them in the studio, which I doubt they were. For example Hendrix's first album I believe was recorded with small combo amps - please some Hendrix freak correct me if I'm wrong. I think it's more about miking/multi-track techniques.

I think you're right, being loud as hell in the studio was frowned on and still is today

tho I think albums like fun house and exile on main street and white light/white heat were attempts to get at a live + loud sound

also some of the thinness in studio recordings of the day might be due to some lag in studio equipment/engineering techniques in keeping up with what was rapidly evolving on the live front in the mid 60s

this is one of my favorite ILM threads in a while, loving everybody's contributions here and wish i had something to add

also I imagine those new concert bass amplifiers were pushing out frequencies engineers had never encountered before

in addition I like the word also

marshall obv a critical force in the history of loud/heavy

Not without Fender. The first Marshall, the JTM-45, was a copy of the very successful Fender
Bassman with only minor changes. Fender had been doing loud for awhile. Dick Dale, for instance, has an entire section in my history of Fender book on how he pushed the Fender engineers into making louder and bigger amps and speaker cabinets for him, so he could be deafening and get the floor shaking live. The original Fender Showman, I think (I'd have to go and get the book), is essentially due to him.

And Humble Pie's first successful US record, Rock On, was recorded with Fender Champs,
small amps, although there are Marshalls in the pics on the back cover. Frampton and Marriott were flipped out by the sound of the Champs running wide open.

blue cheer did actually bring their amps into the studio for their debut. and the album was recorded as if it was a live show. so they played in the studio as loud as they would have live. or almost as loud.

And since 'Revolution' was mentioned in the first message, I do believe the famous guitar tone was not done with an amp at all, but was the result of plugging the guitar straight into the mixing
board with the distortion coming from the board's input preamp.

it's true that a lot of early marshalls were knockoff fenders, but the reliability and bottom end of marshall's 100W amps were the game changers. a fender twin will sandblast the ears clean off yr head but they are not exactly known for their tremendous bass response.

fender had early market penetration on bass amps too but sunn and ampeg eventually ate them for lunch when it came to sheer power.

xp to gorge

I think close-mic-ing individual drums/other instruments began around this time (Joe Meek excepted), possibly due to the introduction of 16-track gear (1st 16-track recordings were made in 1968, I believe). This is probably a contributing factor to -ahem- "improved" drum sounds around this era.

a fender twin can sound just as heavy as a marshall

^^^yeah, in terms of recording, multi-tracking is a major step

x-post

fender twin stack lol

So we’d always been trying to convince Marshall to make us a 100-watt amp. They told us it would be impossible: the amp would be too heavy to carry around. We said, “Put a handle on each end.”

― 鬼の手 (Edward III), Wednesday, May 27, 2009 11:34 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lool

what about using baffles/trying to get clear sound separation between instruments? i guess my impression of mid 60s recording was setting up in one room, just going, which tons of bleed on everything...when did people start using baffles/having people play in separate rooms/etc?

just wondering if that enable people to tweak the low end frequencies or turn up separate parts to a great degree cuz there was less bleed/phase issues?

hey I love fender twins, owned one for many years, and some of my favorite guitarists of all time played 'em (dick dale, andy from dog faced hermans) but if I wanted a bowel rattling roar it wouldn't be the first thing I reached for

I wouldn't reach for a marshall either but that's neither here nor there

my buddy did a sabbath cover band and used a twin, he had iommi's sound dead-on! i swears!

I'm pretty sure that baffles were fairly commonplace from the early 60's - after all, they were used regularly in orchestral recordings.

when did people start using baffles/having people play in separate rooms/etc?

I thought baffles had been around more-or-less forever (not sure about the different rooms approach)

x-post

yeah, you want to talk about bleeding, try recording an orchestra. engineers were waaay smarter about separation, mic placement, etc, before multi-trakcing.

it could be argued that multi-tracking actively reduced the average engineer's skill level in recording everybody at once. before multi-tracking there was no "fixing it in the mix" and you better be fucking ready cuz sinatra is only doing one take of this.

fender twin stack lol

In Johnny Winter And, Johnny Winter and Rick Derringer played through Twins. Each had a 'stack' in the shape of a pyramid.

a fender twin can sound just as heavy as a marshall

What he said.

From The Soul of Tone, a history of Fender amplification:

Elsewhere in this book, Alexander Dumble, Mike Soldano, Peter Frampton, Paul Rivera, Paul Reed Smith ... [and others] all refer to Marshall's basing its prototype amps on Fender's 4x10 Bassman. The tweed Bassman also served as the first inspiration for the first Mesa-Boogie circuit which was housed in a Fender Princeton cab...

...this author was able to track down the owner of the very amp Ken Bran (service engineer at Marshall's shop in London) examined while prototyping the first Marshall. His name was Mike Boner

Boner: I was a manager in Jim Marshall's store when he began building his amps ... One day, a US serviceman stationed over here brought the Bassman in question (in) ... The shop purchased it, as he was returning to the States, and we put it into stock...Soon after I sold it to the bass player with Adam Faith & the Roulettes. They were a chart-topping 60's band, pre-Beatles. I bumped into that bass player a few years later and found they had a deal with Vox, and they all had AC30s. He still had the Bassman locked away in a cupboard at a school were he used to rehearse. He said if I wanted it, he would sell it to me. I met him at the school that weekend and paid him 60 pounds for it.

I had been with Cliff Bennett & the Rebel Rousers from about 1958 to 1961, and in '61 I joined Jim Marshall's retail store. The following year, after initially making speaker cabinets, it was decided to build guitar amps. The Bassman was such a great-sounding amp that Jim asked to borrow it. I brought it to work. Ken Bran drew up the (Marshall) schematic from it across the street in the old original store, and the rest, as they say, is history.

http://westernswing78.blogspot.com/

xpost
(thank you very much)

(also, coversely, marshall heads can sometimes be GREAT for clean tone recording stuff, we had some great results with them, you just gotta get out of the mental habit of thinking marshall=ac/dc tone and fender=cleaner or more 60s)

Any way to find out what ZZTop's rig was in the early '70s? Gorge? That was about the filthiest sound ever put on wax.

trying to remember the intro dates of 1 inch 8 track and 2 inch 16 track recording capabilities - my gut says that 1 inch was 67 and 2 inch was 69, which is prob a big part of this.

will check and return

oh yeah that was like 4 billion xposts btw

These answers are great. It looks like they're all part of the puzzle -- it may be that it did not occur to some rock recording engineers to use baffles like classical until the late 60s. Amps, 8 track, 16 track, 2" tape, it all makes sense. Except for Scott. Sorry man, I respect most of your writing, but you are on the crack here!

78 rpm record, 40dB dynamic range
45 rpm, 45dB
33 rpm, 50-75dB

I hear those wax cylinders really rocked too.

http://www.enjoythemusic.com/magazine/manufacture/0409/

The Who are definitely the pioneers of expanded range and volume live, but unfortunately their only recordings in 1968 were the throwaway "Dogs I & II" single, and "Magic Bus." Tommy certainly did a great job with Moon's drum sound the next year though. I would have cited The Yardbirds' "Think About It," but I haven't heard it in forever. I need to get a better comp with that on it.

Just because bands were using big stacks in live performance doesn't mean they were using them in the studio, which I doubt they were.

Well, wait, isn't there a slight caveat to this? Up until a certain point, the only way to get distortion out of a tube amp was to crank up the channel volume, so if that were your goal you'd still wind up with a certain loud-and-heavy race going on in the studio. (And then a bigger one replicating that sound in a big show with a bigger amp, which probably feeds back into your expectations of the tones you want in the studio, and around and around in circles...)

I like how everyone's touched on most of the stuff that probably goes into this. The year we're talking about is around the point where rock music had established itself centrally enough that the technology around it was excitedly catering to its needs, so all these things would contribute -- bigger and higher-gain amps, multi-tracking, compression, etc. -- and then all those things would feed back into the style of the music itself. Overall it just seems like some idea of heaviness asserted itself as an ideal in some rock quarters, and all the tools involved started following that ideal outward.

my buddy did a sabbath cover band and used a twin, he had iommi's sound dead-on! i swears!

I don't doubt this, the twin's an extremely versatile amp, but my point is that if we're talking about what influenced the trend of music getting heavier in the mid to late 60s, fender is an accessory to the crime

^ possible caveat to my caveat: I guess the first common fuzz pedals were coming around as of 66 or so? but yeah, that wouldn't eat into the tube-distortion game for a while yet

78 rpm record, 40dB dynamic range
45 rpm, 45dB
33 rpm, 50-75dB

i don't doubt these stats. i'm just saying that records were louder and "heavier" when people were shorter and lived near the water. and that includes 33 rpm LPs.

you guys ever tried to tote a bag of 78s around??? much heavier than a bag of LPs.

Seriously I have some doo wop & R&B 78s with an incredibly heavy bass sound which would not be adequately reproduced if i digitized them so you guys should all just come over and we'll have a party with the hi-fi.

Any way to find out what ZZTop's rig was in the early '70s? Gorge? That was about the filthiest sound ever put on wax.

Billy G. has probably used almost every famous amp ever made. And a lot of obscure ones and he and ZZ Top were obviously fond of a variety of stacks onstage.

But checking the book of tone, again:

Billy G: My very first amp when I was a kid was a Champ. I've still got it. Steve Cropper gave me his Fender Harvard, which he cut a lot of those early Stax recordings on. Back in the day we described a setup we nicknamed The Amp Cabin, and basically that was just our nickname for this stack of amps that we built in a box with a microphone in the
middle ... We had a couple of Champs. One was a little two-tone. They called it the Champ 600. We've still got all this stuff in the warehouse. We've got the Harvard. We had a single-15 Pro with that kind of pinkish brown tolex, a '60, a '61. We had an early blonde Fender Tremolux with the maroon grill cloth. I believe it was two 10's. We spent a lot of time matching up amps to guitars. Like on 'Blue Jean Blues,' that was a Strat and we had tried using a Marshall, but it was just too dirty. 'Blue Jean' was just suited to cleaner tone. Go back and play it, man. It was really crystal clear. I'm inclined to think it was a little brown Tolex Fender Deluxe ... it had only a volume and tone on the faceplate, and I remember cranking the tone knob all the way up and keeping the volume low to maintain a real clear signal.

Another famous quote from Billy G: When all is said and done, I go back to the house and plug into a 4x10 Bassman and just turn it up ... The late-50s 5F6-A Bassman is it. That is the amp, or more correctly, the circuit...

=======
So I think we can say Billy G certainly used Marshalls but his touchstones on those early recordings was a lot of old Fender gear.

There would appear to be a goof in logic on the Wikipedia page about fuzzboxes:

Davies played through a small amp whose speaker cone had been slashed with a razor blade, distorting the signal. In 1964 he plugged the doctored amp into a Vox AC30 to record "You Really Got Me," the band's first number one single and the first popular rock & roll song using a distorted power chord riff(Walser 1993, p.9).

and, hey, i'm not completely crazy like those dudes who refuse to listen to anything recorded after 1929. i just think recorded sound went downhill after the 50's. the 50's are my gold standard.

stereo ruined everything.

those dudes who refuse to listen to anything recorded after 1929

I think the traditional cut off for hot jazz dudes is 1933.

(xpost - unless possibly what it's trying to get at is that he used the first amp just to add gain and overload the Vox more easily?)

you may need to consult Walser on that one, nabs.

Elpico Amp (The 'Green Amp') - 1962
I bought this in a radio spares shop in Muswell Hill in 1962. I couldn't afford a Watkins Dominator or a bigger posher amp! I went home and plugged the Elpico loudspeaker's output leads into the input of the AC 30, in effect using the smaller amp as kind of a pre-amp. It sounded great, but I wasn't satisfied. The crowning glory of my simple yet effective experiment was to slash the speaker cone of the Elpico with a razor blade so that the material, although now shredded, still remained intact with the outer side of the cone. As it vibrated it produced a distorted and jagged roar. In fact, the original set-up was so crude that the main amp's hum was almost as loud as the sound I had created. A sound was born, but I didn't know it at the time. Immediately I started using my set-up in live shows that I performed with Ray and our band, in the time leading up to the creation of the Kinks. Ironically, it was that sound, which we used on 'You Really Got Me,' that got the Kinks our first hit. - Excerpt from 'Kink' - An Autobiography by Dave Davies © 1996

nah i think he put a mic on the first amp and ran that signal into the Vox iirc xposts

given of course the fact that a lot of early recording lore is of the too stoned to remember/full of shit variety

xpost - yes, that Que version makes sense -- the Wikipedia person has phrased it as if the slashed speaker on the first amp would have anything to do with running it through the second one, which it obviously wouldn't

or miking, sure

the slashed speaker trick is a lot older than Ray Davies - Hound Dog Taylors band did it for sure, my father and a stunned and shocked Fender rep watched them do it to a van full of new twins right before a show.

woah Hound Dog Taylor, fuck yeah!

speaking of your dad, JJ, where those tapes at?!

yeah ive heard the tape of it and the guitar tone is kind of insane - not to mention that the bass is also being run through a slashed speaker twin and sounds like FUZZ NOIZE DETH.

XPOST ah fuck dude i still owe you that JF aaaggghhh

well, you don't OWE me anything, i'm just super curious!

(to avoid a total derail here - the tapes are in stasis because of some health shit with my dad but hes fine now and i am back to harrassing him on the daily. it'll happen.)

xpost: no i know but if i feel obligation i get shit done so im just trying to trick myself

wait are these tapes of hound dog taylor???

in the 60's and 70's and beyond this country totally lost the plot. ya gotta go euro or japanese for great sound.

RVG EAR MONO ORIG

i have a japanese pressing of some Bud Powell album on Verve and it sounds sooooooo nice. Not heavy, but really rich and full.

getting back to the original question, from wikipedia:

The U.K. division of Decca Records was among the first to install a professional eight-track recorder at its London recording studio in 1967. This equipment was used to record Days of Future Passed by the Moody Blues which was released in December 1967 on Deram Records.

Because the Beatles did not gain access to eight-track recorders until later on, their groundbreaking Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band LP (1967) was created using pairs of four-track machines; the group also used vari-speed (also called pitch shift) to achieve unique sounds, and they were the first group in the world to use an important offshoot of multitrack recording, the Automatic Double Tracking (ADT) system invented by Abbey Road staff engineer Ken Townshend in 1966. The Beatles used eight-track to record portions of the White Album, the single "Hey Jude" and the later Abbey Road. It was during the White Album sessions of 1968 that EMI's Abbey Road Studios finally had eight-track recorders installed, and up until then, the group had to go elsewhere to record with eight-tracks.

Other artists began experimenting with multitrack's possibilities also, with the Music Machine (of "Talk Talk" fame) recording on a custom-built ten-track setup, and Pink Floyd collaborating with former Beatles recording engineer Norman "Hurricane" Smith, who produced their first albums.

In 1968 Ampex built the first prototype sixteen-track recorder at the request of Mirasound Studios in New York City. Not long after it this it introduced the production model MM-1000, the first commercially available 16-track recording machine. One of these machines was installed at CBS Studios in New York City where it was used to record songs for the second album by Blood, Sweat & Tears released in early 1969. 1968's "Crimson And Clover" by Tommy James and the Shondells was among the first sixteen-track recordings to be released (mixed to stereo and mono); another was Frank Zappa's 1969 album Hot Rats, recorded at various studios in Los Angeles. (A 1987 remix of the opening track, "Peaches En Regalia", became the first compact disc single, years later.) Another early 16 track recording was Volunteers by Jefferson Airplane also from 1969. The back of the Jefferson Airplane album cover includes a picture of the MM-1000.

The first 16-track machine in the U.K. was probably the one installed at Trident Studios, London in late 1969. After The Flood a song from the Van Der Graaf Generator album The Least We Can Do Is Wave To Each Other was recorded at this studio on 16 tracks in December 1969. Other groups using the same studio at this time included Genesis and David Bowie as well as Queen who experimented with multi tracking extensively most prominently on their albums Queen II and A Night at the Opera.

xpost to Que: yeah, some of them are. i should probably just start a thread about the stuff finally, ive mostly kind of kept it off the radar - i'll try to get one rolling today and i can get more into it there.

"i have a japanese pressing of some Bud Powell album on Verve and it sounds sooooooo nice"

i wish everyone in the world could hear my mint japanese pressing of madcap laughs. there would be world peace.

ian, try and find some of those japanese 45rpm jazz ten inch reissues. they can be a revelation.

Up until a certain point, the only way to get distortion out of a tube amp was to crank up the channel volume, so if that were your goal you'd still wind up with a certain loud-and-heavy race going on in the studio.

this is logical but not really true - iirc link wray recorded "rumble" on a little 30 watt silvertone with holes punched in the speaker. not loud but way distorted (and also famously influential on townsend).

getting a little nerdy here but there is a difference between distortion and overdrive, there was a lot of gtr distortion around in the late 50s/early 60s, think of all the buzzy surf and garage band guitars.

still thinking about the development of the high powered concert bass amp as being a key driver behind the emergence of "heavy" sounds, once amps were capable of loudly pushing out those low end frequencies every thing else fell into line.

another critical development in the future of heaviness was a 1965 industrial accident involving the loss of two fingers by a birmingham sheet metal worker named frank

I wasn't really counting speaker-slashing, Edward, since it's less of a "heavy" sound -- just talking about the actual tube distortion that forms so much of the basis of what we consider a big/heavy guitar sound.

Which, yeah, you can get distortion from the tube of a small amp at a more reasonable volume, sure, but I guess part of my point was that there was some kind of race over into smoother distorted high-gain sounds, in that sort of "heavy blues" sense, that was surely a factor here -- especially given that there was surely a lot more connection/interplay at that point between most acts' studio and stage sounds.

(I feel like most of the surf stuff you're talking about was more of a high slashy buzz -- e.g. that Ventures "bee" noise, which Wikipedia tells me was made using the world's first fuzz pedal. I guess the year we're talking about would be one of the first moments when a reasonably well-funded guitar player would start to have a wide-ranging choice between various amp sizes/wattages and tube distortion vs. fuzz pedals, etc.)

Did anyone see that guitar doc with jimmy page, the edge and jack white? let's get loud or something?

A fair bit of garbage in it to sit through... but some cool zeppelin stuff for sure - there's a bit where jimmy page plays air guitar to almost all of Link Rumble in his stately home, grinning like a little kid.

Anyway just the mention of Link above made me think of it. Heavy '68 owed old Link for sure.

anyway, great thread.

Well, wait, isn't there a slight caveat to this? Up until a certain point, the only way to get distortion out of a tube amp was to crank up the channel volume, so if that were your goal you'd still wind up with a certain loud-and-heavy race going on in the studio. (And then a bigger one replicating that sound in a big show with a bigger amp, which probably feeds back into your expectations of the tones you want in the studio, and around and around in circles...)

^This. And having the likes of Roger Mayer waiting on you hand and foot designing pedals.

another critical development in the future of heaviness was a 1965 industrial accident involving the loss of two fingers by a birmingham sheet metal worker named frank

I supposed the availability unwound and thinner strings played a role here too- you hear about the early heavy players tracking down banjo strings and such to get more sustain.

Surely a lot of it just has to be aesthetic decisions during the recording process..? Listen to Sonny and Cher's I Got You Babe" (1965) (go ahead, it'll take you 30 seconds on slsk), Hal Blaine's snare goes from big to immense at around the 2:05 mark (sounds like the engineer opening a room mic or something). I'd wager these are some of the loudest drum sounds ever recorded, and this in a bubblegum pop song.

A case could be made for Jamaican music too, with the transition from rocksteady to reggae. However pretty much all the recording studios there were bare bones running on a tight budget, so the technology took a few more years to spread.

another critical development in the future of heaviness was a 1965 industrial accident involving the loss of two fingers by a birmingham sheet metal worker named frank

^ fucking awesome

I haven't even read all of the above but basically:

1) High wattage amplifiers
2) Jimi Hendrix
3) drums coming up in the mix (Led Zeppelin I&II and Who's Next)

But then drums coming up in the mix comes down to having extra tracks to devote to the drums & knowing how to mike the drums the right way.

Sure. But that also could have been corrected with mic placement at any point in the 20th century. So I'd say it was still an aesthetic drive by producers like Jimmy Page and Kit Lambert and Rodger Bain et al.

yeah, nobody knew how to record drums correctly before those guys. hahahahahahahahahahahhaha!

Yeah, they sure were incompetent at Chess.

^4track fyi

I thought we were talking about the birth of heavy rock here, not jazz. Sigh.

BTW, Junior Murvin's kickdrum tone ain't got nuthin on Bonham's.

Yeah there seems to be some confusion as to what was meant by heaviness.

But anyway since there's been some talk of pre-68 non-hard-rock heaviness, the drum and bass on this one impresses me ('64):

Really I just wanted any excuse to post it cuz it rulz.

Oh, and the talk about speaker slashin / Hound Dog Taylor cuttin up his Twin, this is totally awesome too:

Ok ok, as you were.

What's always puzzled my is how thin and tinny a lot of early 70's rock sounds. MC5's 'Back in the USA' is the example that springs to mind, plus a lot of early glam

I think they thought they were trying to do a "back to rock and roll and the 50s" thing

The lysergic acid diethylamide advance in the human being technology made music get heavy in 1968

You mean heroin and speed? LSD was on its way out in '68.

And Mandrax gave us Sabbath and Hawkwind!

xpost " think they thought they were trying to do a "back to rock and roll and the 50s" thing"

That's what's so weird - all those mono 50's Rock'n'Roll records have a sound that is actually bigger, warmer, dirtier, bassier and all around heavier. Maybe it was the sound of cheapo 50's hits comps badly remastered for 8-track that they we shooting for.

Typing skills not improved by fine Polish lager this hot summer evening. Thanks for the Hound Doug Taylor clip.

there is a drum shift at some point, but I'd say it's basically aesthetic, yes, maybe abeted by some technological stuff -- I mean basically this broad era contains a shift from recording how musicians sound as a whole in a room to really separating out and homing in on the smaller number of elements in a 4/5-piece rock band, right? I suppose a lot of the real zooming in on individual drums seriously ramped up much later on, and there are some big exceptions to this sort of thing (Bonham sounds "heavy" even if it's just one mono room mic), but it does seem like there's the start of a continuing shift from instruments-in-rooms to this more artificial and enhanced soundstage, and that's a bigger switch with drums than with guitars for sure

I haven't read this entire thread, but wasn't close micing largely responsible for this?

I always thought part of that punchier sound was a result of mics being set closer the amps, snare, etc.

also this is total drum geek stuff that i'm probably getting semi-wrong but i remember something about how a lot of drummers used to use what was called "oil filled heads" on their drums...where there was a thin layer of oil between the skins to deaden the sound, don't know how that figures but i'm pretty sure ian paice from deep purple used them

Best thread in a long time. My slightly related 2 cents:

- check for Johnny Burnette story about dropping his amp loading in for a radio gig. When he plugged in his amp sounded fucked, and when they checked, one of his tubes had come slightly out of it's socket. When they pushed it in, it was fine. He pulled it back out and presto, "Train Kept A'Rollin'"... I tried it with a friend's Twin, perfect fuzz. It's really hard on your amp tho'.

- 1st person anecdote: We had Union Carbide over to record an album for my then-label, Fistpuppet. The lead guitar player SPECIFICALLY requested an SVT, but I had a friend with an Orange, with a 6x8, or 8x8 cab, so we hauled that over to the Metro for their pre-session gig. He was really upset and was fairly grumpy until at some point he started to crank it up. By the end of the set they had pulled him out of the mains entirely and he was still the loudest thing in the room.

We had Union Carbide over to record an album for my then-label, Fistpuppet

uh. do you have any Jon Wayne stories?

wow, you released albums by The Ex! Thanks!

(xpost)

One of the reasons I brought Marshall into the discussion early even thought the OP was about the records is because I think that as the live music got louder it changed the perception of what the records could sound like. Rock recording and concert sound became more about an electronically created sound and less about reproducing or amplifying an existing traditional instrument sound. I think the different potential definitions of "heaviness" are wrapped up in this evolving process.

Then the labels and studios had to get on board with the sound engineers allowing the sounds the bands were experiencing live onto the records. All these old guys had explicit defined rules about how to go about things, and they either came around or got replaced by younger guys. They might have had excellent technique for getting fat sound from a stand up bass, but were more clueless when it came to an overly loud electric bass.

I disagree with fastnbulbus about Jefferson Airplane. I would put them at the forefront of the change rather than the ignored it category.

xpost - Hey Matt, those drum heads are called hydraulic heads and they sound great. I pretty much use them exclusively (except on kick and snare of course).

ah cool, i knew i butchered the name...how do they differ soundwise from regular heads? deader and thuddier sorta?

Me too. Hydraulic heads galore. Batter side only, thinner heads on the bottom. I have damper rings in my kick tho'.

I have Ex stories, I have Jon Wayne stories, I have Bruce Pavitt stories (FIGURATIVELY) up the butt... but that's for another thread. I actually SAW Jon Wayne play LIVE at my friend's birthday party, in her yard. That's how I met them and got to put the record out. They were really good. And they drank a LOT of Jack Daniels. Then I got two years of phone calls about how the new album was going. Their bass player was Tommy Spurlock, who for some reason went under the name Timmy Turlock. I Googled him 'cause I could never remember which was his real name, I used to call him Timmy-Tommy. Check him out... studio in Pullman cars! http://www.phoebeclaire.com/BIO/tommyspurlockbio.htm

Jimbo (put my amp in the car) is a fucking great drummer, he was in Medicine, and did a tour in Whitehouse playing synth, dressed all in white, with pink fingernail polish. Last time I saw him was at a Medicine gig @ SXSW, they had flown directly from the set of The Crow.

That album was actually made by just Jim and Dave (Jon). All the patter is fake (sorry). I still think it's brilliant, and not cause it's funny, I love everything about the music. I had shirts made and I had a guy chase me down the street somewhere yelling... hey, hey!

All these old guys had explicit defined rules about how to go about things, and they either came around or got replaced by younger guys.

And so you've got Jimmy Page, after a few years getting recorded by the old guys, deciding to record Zeppelin himself.

Your observation also got me thinking about how Phil Spector had the "biggest" sound in the era immediately preceding heavy rock- reverb and a roomful of instruments were equated with creating a booming sound. This wasn't applicable to the power trios and big-amp acts that get going from 1965 on, but it took a few years to figure that out.

yeah, re: phil spector, i know that John Cale has said w/ the Velvet Underground, he specifically wanted a "Spector sound with as few instruments as possible." So those guys spent a lot of time trying to get heavy w/o adding a ton of players -- hence the need for more powerful amps/equipment.

how true is this statement: rock started off using one mic for drums, then started using multiple mics

http://www.musicradar.com/news/guitars/jim-marshall-dies-aged-88-538243

just this moment added a new thread on this, felt he deserved one of his own.

Here's your thread for Jim Marshall:

RIP Jim Marshall