60's technology

[Stereo Recording]

Stereo recording, stereo standing for stereophonic, is where you use two channels, left and right, to create a sense of dimension and space, this makes the song sound like there are noises coming from different directions. Stereophonic stands for solid sound. 

Before the 60s everything was recorded using mono recording. For example, The Beatles initially recorded all of their big hits through mono recording, this is because stereo technology wasn't made available to artists yet and wasn't really affordable at the time. It was only the later years of the 1960s that stereo recording became more affordable to musicians globally.  

[Multitrack Tape Machines]

Multitrack tape machines is where you can have multiple audio tracks recording simultaneously or layered onto a single reel of tape. This provided producers with more ways to experiment with sounds. For example, a musician could decide to record each instrument, or different vocal parts, separately and then mixing them afterwards. This meant that they could do more difficult things like overdubbing and creating intricate soundscapes. 

These machines came quite high in terms of price and were built relatively bulky. This meant that they were harder to get a hold of. Alongside being expensive, they only hold somewhere between 4 to 8 track, which meant that artists were restricted with the amount that they record. This also meant that producers who did use these machines had to be quite careful in managing that track space, frequently bouncing them.

[Vocal Booths]

Vocal booths are rooms that have been insulated to trap the sounds that are made in the room, amazing for vocals because it means there is no background noise bleeding into the microphone, so the vocals will come back really clearly in the recording. If you are aiming to make a high quality studio, then this is an essential thing that you would need to add to it. 

In the 60s, vocals booths changed the way music sounded in that era. As recording technology advanced, studios did too. They started to bring in vocal booths. This allowed them to record the vocals separately, also making it easier for sound engineers to control over everything to do with how the vocals sound.  This meant that we had access to making more complicated and richer productions. This was so influential to studio driven acts such as The Beatles, allowing them to become more creative with their music and have more freedom to explore greater aspects of music which would come later on in the development of music.