![]() The first man to build his own rudimentary recording studio was Stanley Motta, whose main lines of business were photography, hiring out Public Address systems, and selling records and electrical goods from his shops in Half Way Tree and downtown Kingston’s Harbour Street.ĭescribed as “a room with one mike and a piano”, Motta’s studio was situated on Hanover Street, and in 1951, with an eye to the tourist trade as well as the local market, he began to produce a series of calypso and mento tunes which he would sent to the UK for manufacturing prior to being shipped back for sale in Jamaica on his own MRS (Motta’s Recording Studio) label. In late fifties Jamaica, the island’s fledgling music industry concentrated on recording local music forms (mento, calypso and folk) and licensing radio-friendly pop (and some Jazz, Latin and R&B) from America. Visionary producers and engineers such as Phil Spector, Shadow Morton, Tom Dowd at Atlantic, and the in-house teams at independent label-owned studios such as Chess, Stax, and of course Motown led American pop, r&b and soul music through the sixties, while in Britain George Martin and the Beatles, and of course the legendary Joe Meek pushed the boundaries of British pop. Many producers, engineers and studios developed their own individual signature sounds, and by the end of the sixties most pop fans could recognise the work of the more outstanding producers and labels just by the sound that came out of their transistor radios, irrespective of who was singing. Producers and engineers found new ways to record music, forever trying to create a sound that was cleaner, bigger, brighter and punchier than their competitors’, and in doing so made their contributions to the records just as important (in some cases more so!) than that of the artists themselves. ![]() The new two-track recorders unlocked many doors for the new breed of music makers, and the next decade would bring even more advances in sound engineering as machines with three, four and then eight tracks were commercially developed. It wasn’t long before the record industry recognised the importance of the new technology and by the early fifties Ampex were supplying the leading American studios with two-track (stereo) machines. However, guitar genius Les Paul, who had already pioneered the art of overdubbing while still using acetate discs and was now using tape machines for advanced concepts such as phasing, echo and so on, had built the world’s first eight-track tape recorder and was using it to record a stunning series of hit records. With the resulting improvement in dynamic range and frequency response it became more practical to ‘over-dub’ extra instrumental or vocal parts by transferring the original performance from one tape machine to another while blending in the overdubbed part, which would have been played or sung ‘live’ at the same time.Įven though the use of tape unlocked the imaginations of the more pioneering pop and rock & roll producers (tape could be edited, speeded up or slowed down, played backwards, used for echo effects, etc), the overdubbing process would only allow for a few layers of sound to be added before the quality became diminished to a very noticable degree, and in any case all of these recordings ended up in mono because the tape heads contained just one ‘track’. When American and British engineers worked on captured German Magnetophon recorders after the Second World War the modern tape recorder was developed, and during the fifties it became more and more commonplace for commercial music to be recorded onto magnetic tape rather than directly to disc. Cylinders, then gramophone records, had been made by recording the artists and musicians directly on to wax or acetate discs, which were then sent for processing (and manufacture) with little or no further ado - whichever performance or ‘take’ had been chosen as the master was what the public heard when it was released. ![]() To fully appreciate the growth and development of the dub phenomenon, it may be helpful to know a little of the history and some of the techniques involved in recording popular music.Įver since Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, and the sound of music could be stored, copied and made commercially available, the processes involved had remained generally the same.
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