Recording during the 70's

Recording in the '70s became a whole different ballgame with the introduction of multitracking. For rock music this opened up a whole new world, piling track upon track in ever more elaborate productions. This put new demands on engineering and mixing and production skills, which had to be mastered. In many cases this resulted in a muddy, thick sound without any room to breath. Remember that eternal quote: 'we want everything to be louder than everything else'.

You’re right, I should have been more precise. Recording with 4 or 8 tracks was available in the ’60s, but that was still a long way from the 24 track machines (and more) that became available in the ’70’s. This was the multitracking technology that fundamentally changed production methods, putting every conceivable sound on separate tracks and mixing the whole thing to death.

Absolutely. The recording of acoustic instruments in a real space - referred to by some as ’The Absolute Sound’ - reached its peak in that era. Not in spite of limited technology, but thanks to it. In the early stereo days engineers only had a few tracks available and used only a few very high quality tube microphones to capture the sound.

Decca’s ’Tree’, Mercury’s Living Presence and RCA’s Living Stereo all used similar set ups, with highly skilled ’balance’ engineers like Kenneth Wilkinson, Robert C. Fine and Lewis Layton at the controls. To this day these recordings are considered the most truthful renderings of classical music. A similar situation existed in the same era for acoustic jazz, with engineers like Rudy van Gelder, Roy duNann and others. For these small ensembles (big) mono sounded even more natural than stereo, which in the early days sometimes suffered from exaggerated left-right panning.

Multitrack recording changed this practice and starting in the late ’60s orchestral recordings became more processed and - dare I say - somewhat artificial. Decca experimented with multimiking in their Phase Four series, some of the worst recordings they ever made. Thankfully for their regular SXL series they used multimiking and -tracking with much more restraint and many of their ’70s recording are still excellent.

In fact early rock recordings - before excessive multitracking took over - tend to sound more real and dynamic as well. For instance, it’s hard to believe that those early Can recordings were made by Holger Czukay with just a two track Revox and very limited mixing. Same with early Mothers of Invention and so many other pioneering bands. Too much technology is not always a good thing....