Mellotronists

On Wed, 3 Mar 2004, Andy Thompson wrote:

> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Brundage, Jim" <JPB@...>
> To: "Andy Thompson" <andy.thompson@...>;
> <Mellotronists@yahoogroups.com>
> Sent: Wednesday, March 03, 2004 3:30 PM
> Subject: RE: [Mellotronists] 10cc
> 
> Jon remembers the 48 tracks - I heard 24, or I think I did. Is 1975 a bit
> early to be hooking up two 24-track machines? Were there any 48-track desks?
> *Loads* of reverb on it, of course, making it all sound bigger.


i used to think it was all done via a fairlight, as it has the
same sort of odd quality that fairlight "voices" had... but my
ears were not so sophisticated, and i attributed anything that
i could not easily explain to one of those $100k+ tools...
it's really amazing what people can accomplish just with imagination
and by pushing current technology to the extremes... aaah, innovation!

back then a lot of audio engineering was of the "rube goldberg"
type - lots of custom-built little black boxes, hand built consoles,
hybrid consoles made from various modules from different companies...
an engineer knew a lot more electrical engineering back then.

there were likely a few cutting-edge studios with 2 24-track
machines locked together via tach-pulses and little black
boxes - i don't think smpte was even that common back then.
a 48-channel desk was certainly available some places.
a couple years later the 3M 32 track digital was born, and
the digital fomat wars following shortly thereafter.

[when sony introduced the pcm 3348, capable of adding 24 more
tracks to an existing 24-track digital master, things changed
greatly - including recording budgets!!]


> Andy T.


...jeff

[we have dual studer 24-track machines and a 56 input ssl 9000j
here at our studio, but protools has been the recording format
of choice for a couple years now. acts bring a couple firewire
drives instead of 2-inch tape stock... and the half-inch 2-track
has been collecting dust for as long as i can remember...]