Sometimes, it’s not about the mics you use — it’s how you use them. Let’s say, hypothetically, you were hired to record a rock group on the floor of the Grand Canyon with no audience and no budget constraints. Obviously, you would multi-mic the band as usual. But, presented with virtually unlimited ambience, where else would you place microphones? If this scenario has piqued your interest, then read on. You’re in for a treat. Join us as we time travel back to the glory days of RCA Studios in New York City for some vintage tales of unbridled engineers with a passion for new sounds.
Recording Rock in Orchestra Halls
After Columbia Records sold off their 30th Street Studios in 1981, RCA Studios held the distinction of having the only world-class symphony-orchestra recording halls in New York City. At the time a division of multinational conglomerate RCA Corporation, RCA Records occupied 10 stories of a midtown office building housing three orchestra studios, a smaller “rock” studio, a dedicated mix room, five live echo chambers, a mastering suite, and dozens of edit rooms. Well-funded by their corporate overlords, the studios benefitted from the finest equipment: automated Neve 80-series consoles, Studer and Ampex tape machines, Neumann cutting lathes, and a mic locker a city block long, overflowing with a massive, mouthwatering collection of meticulously maintained vintage mics and outboard processors as well as an extensive selection of the latest state-of-the-art gear.
The Engineering Gig of a Lifetime
At RCA Studios New York in the early 1980s, “red-hot” recording engineers were lured away from so-called rock studios like the Hit Factory and the Record Plant by the promise of cushy union gigs with overtime, benefits, and free rein to do things their way. Acquired in an initiative to bring in rock business, shake things up, and revitalize the stodgy corporate atmosphere at RCA, these young Turks occasionally encountered red tape over the methodologies they employed to achieve the results for which they were hired.
The Pursuit of Ambience
Mostly, these conflicts with management arose over unconventional microphone techniques deployed in the pursuit of ambience. At EMI Studios (Abbey Road) in the 1960s, Beatles’ engineer Geoff Emerick frequently found himself in hot water for violating EMI’s strict mic-distancing protocols with his close-miking experimentations. At RCA in the ’80s, it was the opposite. Although there were no rules regarding mic techniques — and close-miking was certainly used — the newly minted RCA engineers were keen to explore the considerable acoustic potential of their new digs. And, for that, they would need to pull the mics back — way back.
The Cherry Picker
RCA owned several 3,000-pound industrial “cherry picker” hydraulic lifts used by the maintenance staff primarily to change light bulbs in the 40-foot ceilings of the three large studios. Of course, it wasn’t long before the rock engineers started to commandeer these in the dead of night for hanging mics to leverage the glorious acoustics of these rooms. Each room built to accommodate a full 100-piece symphony orchestra, Studios A, B, and C had gorgeous parquet wood floors and reverb decay times of 2.4, 1.9, and 1.2 seconds respectively; so, you can imagine how a snare drum sounded when captured by a shotgun mic from 38 feet above — like a rifle shot! To alter the default acoustics, the curved maple wall panels were motorized and continuously movable. Operated remotely from the control rooms, the diffraction panels could be individually reversed to expose their flat, absorptive sides.
Creative Persistence
Issues with management invariably arose when the “suits” would arrive at the office in the morning to be greeted by complaints from the maintenance staff that their hydraulic lifts were not where they had left them the previous day. In a union shop like RCA, the recording engineers were in a different union from the maintenance staff, for whom anyone touching their equipment was cause for filing a grievance! But the offending recording engineers, backed up by their veteran staff counterparts (and ultimately their own union), never yielded to management pressure to cease and desist. They kept on liberating the cherry pickers whenever needed, and it wasn’t uncommon for a bewildered janitor to find two of them in one studio, rigged with a dozen microphones and symmetrically flanking a drum kit, lidless grand piano, or some other setup.
Exploring the Physical Plant
Determined to fully explore — and exploit — the vast physical plant at their beck and call, the young Turks would have their assistant engineers run mic cables down hallways, up stairwells, and into restrooms, conference rooms, and offices. On one occasion, a vice president opened his office door on a Monday morning to find a Marshall 4×12 cabinet on his desk, surrounded by a forest of mic stands positioned to highlight the reflectivity of the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Avenue of the Americas. As the session had ended minutes before, the assistant, exhausted by the weekend marathon and in no condition to tear down the setup, was already on his way home. Needless to say, this particular incident — and numerous others — engendered friction within the ranks.
The Tunnel of Doom
An urban recording legend that originated at the Hit Factory migrated over to RCA Studios, where it was taken to new heights of excess. The original trick involved a Neumann U 47 FET at the end of a 10-foot pipe attached to the front of a bass drum. The natural delay and comb filtration picked up by the FET 47 at the end of the tube, mixed with a Sennheiser MD 421 capturing the beater impact inside the drum, resulted in a huge, complex kick sound.
Pushing the Envelope
At RCA, the massive maintenance shop included workbenches for its crew of electrical engineers as well as a staging area sizable enough to accommodate multiple large-format console rebuilds. Adjacent to this was an enormous storage room where one could find odd and sundry items such as sheet metal, miles of cabling on reels, and conduit of various materials and dimensions.
It was this last category that interested the young Turks, especially upon uncovering a cache of 22-inch-diameter commercial HVAC ducting that could be seamlessly gaff taped to a bass drum, effectively transforming it into a 12-foot-long cannon. New levels of sonic absurdity were attained by adding elbows and extensions to the basic rig. In one instance, the setup stretched out almost 30 feet. Given the considerable amount of track space required for the “tubular kick” sound to bloom, the practical limits of the technique were quickly identified for all recording projects not classified as “solo bass drum.” As you would expect, the technique was employed with varying levels of success on other sources, with electric guitars, background vocals, and even a tenor sax recorded through the “tunnel of doom” actually ending up on major label releases.
The Porcelain Parabolic
Another Hit Factory legend was born when a staff engineer ran out of isolation booths in Studio A. The room’s two iso booths were occupied by the band’s keyboardist on the studio’s Yamaha C7 grand and the lead singer, attempting to strike gold with his scratch vocal so he could fly home to London in time for the holidays. Where to put the guitarist’s Marshall cab? Although baffling it off in the studio would have been the traditional solution, the protocol for this project was squeaky-clean tracks, so the drummer ended up being the only occupant in the tracking room. Long story short, the 4×12 cabinet ended up in the ladies’ lounge, chosen for the balanced reflectivity of its marble walls and floor. Eight mics were set up in there, including a Neumann U 87 with the pad engaged, set to omni, and suspended in the toilet about an inch above the waterline. The sound pressure level inside the room was lethal. The porcelain bowl acted as a parabolic reflector, focusing the sound and bombarding all 360 degrees of the mic’s omnidirectional polar pattern. This technique was ported over to RCA, where it involved, at one time or another, every restroom (and even a rectangular slop sink in a maintenance closet) within a feasible cable run of the studios. The outrageous guitar sound made it onto quite a few albums.
Ambience City
At RCA, each of the studios featured an adjacent soundproofed room containing four EMT 140 stereo plate reverbs and an AKG BX20 spring reverb unit. In every control room resided an EMT 250 digital reverb and a Lexicon 224 algorithmic reverb (later upgraded to the 480L) as well as various reverb rack units from Yamaha and others. In addition, the building housed five live chambers, each patchable from any control room. With such an abundance of ambience options, one might wonder why engineers would go out of their way to gain access to remote areas of the building in search of new sounds. The answer: because they could!
Stairwell to Heaven
One of the advantages of recording in a 47-story office tower is access to the cavernous acoustics of its fireproof stairwells. Essentially a 5,000-foot-tall live chamber of steel-reinforced concrete, the stairwell was a go-to for adventurous RCA engineers seeking the unusual. With the placement of loudspeakers or amp cabs and microphones on various landings only subject to the constraints of balanced cable runs, RCA’s stairwells offered a veritable sonic playground with almost no creative limitations. The caveat, of course, was that they were only available on nights and weekends after all the daily office workers had gone home. During regular business hours, engineers had to make do with the studio’s purpose-built live chambers.
Chambers of Sonic Delight
Engineer Bill Putnam Sr. (the founder of Universal Audio) spearheaded the use of artificial reverb in 1947 by converting his studio restroom into an echo chamber. But, by the ’80s, live chambers were considered passé and a waste of valuable real estate. Yet, nestled deep within the bowels of RCA’s building were five concrete rooms measuring roughly 10 by 14 feet with 9-foot ceilings. Each contained an ancient Altec 604e monitor speaker and a vintage RCA 44 ribbon mic. RCA had completed studio construction in 1969, but, by the late ’70s, the live chambers had fallen into disuse and were in decrepit condition. Due to peeling plaster and layers of dust, the chambers were uniformly dull sounding. But that didn’t discourage our intrepid young Turks. After a sustained pressure campaign, management finally green-lighted a renovation project. Months later — spanking clean, freshly plastered, and outfitted with JBL 4311s and Neumann U 87s — the chambers were once again bright and lively sounding and ready for action.
The Diving Bell
In 1977, New York’s Power Station opened, launching a new trend in studio construction: tracking rooms with multiple integrated isolation booths. Designed in an earlier era for orchestras and solo artists like Frank Sinatra who worked with them, RCA’s three large studios each featured an iso booth that could be positioned as needed. Affectionately dubbed the “diving bell,” the proprietary design was a circular affair measuring eight feet tall and seven feet in circumference. Inside, it was cozy with its own air-circulation unit on the roof, a 360-degree view through thick double studio glass, and total isolation, thanks to its robust 1,800-pound structure. It required at least two people to move it; and, once going, it rolled smoothly on large industrial casters. As the diving bells were well suited for guitar-amp isolation duties, the young Turks bypassed management and asked a sympathetic technical engineer to modify the original internal and external XLR mic-input panels with the addition of 1/4-inch jacks and AC quad boxes. With one loud amp thusly squirreled away and others ensconced in various nearby locations, RCA’s rock engineers could now utilize the mind-blowing acoustics of the orchestra rooms for drums alone.
The Ultimate Drum Room
It should come as no surprise that a studio designed to record full symphony orchestras would sound incredible when used for recording a drum kit. However, at RCA in the ’80s, this involved a lot of experimentation to determine how best to work the rooms to achieve optimal results. When bringing in a new project, the first decision to be made was to identify which studio would be most appropriate for the music. This usually involved the engineer meeting with the producer and possibly band members for an on-site walkthrough. Whereas Studio A’s lush liveness was often uncontrollable (even with some of the diffraction panels reversed) and Studio C was considered a bit “dead” sounding for its size, Studio B was most often selected as having the most workable acoustics. Once they saw the orchestra rooms, very few artists ended up choosing the relatively small Studio D.
Let’s Get Small
With its wall-to-wall carpeting and built-in iso booth, Studio D was, frankly, a fairly standard “rock” room. Interestingly, after a couple of years’ experimentation with Studios A, B, and C, the rock engineers finally turned their attention to Studio D and found not only that the carpeting wasn’t tacked down — it obscured the same beautifully live-sounding parquet wood floors as in the large studios. On a Sunday evening, in preparation for a Monday project start, two assistant engineers were instructed to roll up the carpeting and wrestle it out into the hallway. On Monday morning, all hell broke loose. Stepping around a huge, 30-foot roll of carpeting taking up half the hallway was apparently the last straw for the studio operations manager, who was infamous for two things: his short temper and his brother’s position as a bigwig at corporate. The situation was defused, however, by the savvy studio sales manager, who explained that the peccadillo merely proved that the engineers were going above and beyond to serve the client. The first session in Studio D with the carpeting removed was a resounding success, revealing bright, snappy acoustics that sounded sensational through the Neve console. The carpeting was never reinstalled.
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