{"id":9515,"date":"2007-04-02T15:38:33","date_gmt":"2007-04-02T15:38:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/streettech.dreamhosters.com\/?p=9515"},"modified":"2007-04-02T15:38:33","modified_gmt":"2007-04-02T15:38:33","slug":"deep-inside-the-golden-age-of-analog-recording-technology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/streettech.com\/?p=9515","title":{"rendered":"DEEP Inside the Golden Age of Analog Recording Technology"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/center> <\/p>\n

Last week, I got my copy of Recording The Beatles<\/a>, a new magnum opus from Curvebender Publishing. I’m doing a review of it for MAKE Vol. 11. <\/p>\n

I cannot begin to tell you how off-the-hook amazing this thing is. I was so excited by it, my hands were sweating when I first cracked it open. The “out of box experience” is intense. First off, it weighs a freakin’ TON. It’s oversized, hardbound, 540 pages long. It comes in a thick card slipcase, modeled on a ’60s reel to reel master tape box. Besides the book, you get all sorts of nifty goodies, like copies of B&W snapshots of the Fab Four and their engineers in the studio, a two-sided repro of the lyric sheet for “A Day in the Life,” a postcard to “The Beatles Band” from George Martin on vacation, a poster of the control surface of the main mixing board at EMI Studios, and other misc. stuff. <\/p>\n

Inside the 11-pound wonder, you travel deep, deep into the minutia of the recording process. The book has detailed specs and photos of nearly ever bit of hardware used at Abbey Road from the mics to all of the tape machines and mixing consoles, the effects gear, the speaker systems, the studio instruments, the echo chambers, everything. The recording section goes through things like the Effects, how they were created, how they were used, what tracks they were used on, etc. There are even sidebar charts listing the tracks and the timecodes, so you can cue up the track to the place where various effects were employed. There are gorgeous photos throughout, even floorplans of Abbey Road and each of the studios within. <\/p>\n

\"Digg!\"\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This book offers an amazing opportunity for Beatles fans to delve deeper into each track. You could take a tune, follow it through the book, and deconstruct nearly every aspect of it, from what gear was used on it, to what studio it was recorded in, what instruments were used, what effects, etc. And you could spend years without exhausting the material here. And given the growing interest in analog electronics, especially analog audio, this book is an invaluable guide to all of the equipment used at the peak of analog recording innovation. <\/p>\n

You might think a book like this would be excessively technical and off-putting to those who aren’t extreme audiophiles or sound engineers. This is not the case. The text is surprisingly accessible and engaging. While some readers might not want to read every scrap of info on all the microphone makes and models used at Abbey Road, there’s still plenty of more general info on the studio, the engineers, the recording of each track, etc. You can go as deep as you like And there’s fun stuff here too, like the outhouse-like bathroom they built out the the giant crate that the 3M 8-track tape machine came in. And there’s a great photo of a very young engineer, Alan Parsons (yes THAT Alan Parsons), standing proudly next to the new machine. <\/p>\n

Years ago, I used to read a Beatles biography each year and listen to The Beatles vinyl boxed set from beginning to end. Now I think I’ll pick a song and deconstruct it, using this book to see how much I can discover about it. Gawd, you know what would be great? If The Beatles catalog was available online. Somebody should get to work on that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/streettech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/streettech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/streettech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/streettech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/streettech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9515"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/streettech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9515\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/streettech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/streettech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/streettech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}