Technology that Changed Music — Magnetic Tape

The year was 1945 and World War 2 was slowly grinding to an end as the Allies took control of Europe. France had been fully liberated and Jack Mullin, who was serving in the US Signal Corps, was posted to Paris to find out as much as possible about German audio recording technology.

Initially, his search proved fruitless — all he could find in France was a collection of rudimentary field recorders of limited technological interest. But just as it seemed his search had been in vain, Mullin made a chance discovery during a stopover in Germany that would underpin the recorded music industry for half a century: a magnetic tape recorder.

From wartime propaganda to Bing Crosby

During a layover in Germany, Mullin paid a visit to a German radio station that had been moved to a castle in the town of Bad Nauheim in an effort to avoid the Allied bombing of Frankfurt. At this point, the town was completely under Allied control. Shortly after entering the building, he was given a demonstration of a Magnetophon, a German device that could play back audio from magnetic tape. He was flabbergasted by the quality of the recording, which far exceeded anything that had been available outside Germany at the time, reflecting later: “I couldn’t tell whether it was live or playback. There simply was no background noise.”

The Allies knew from intercepting German radio broadcasts that a groundbreaking new recording technology had been developed which delivered unprecedented audio quality, but nobody outside of the Reich had ever seen these machines. This is where Mullin’s mindset quickly switched from military engineer to entrepreneur. He immediately realised that this technology had enormous commercial potential and shipped two of the machines and 50 rolls of tape to his home address in San Francisco for further analysis. In order to circumvent rules about the maximum size of “war souvenirs”, he disassembled the machines and posted them to the US in 35 separate packages.

Initially, Mullin thought that Hollywood film studios might be interested in using the device to record movie soundtracks. After making some modifications, he presented it to an audience in Hollywood in 1947. This is where he got his first big break — the event was attended by Bing Crosby’s technical director, Murdo Mackenzie, who immediately saw the potential of the technology for the music industry.

At the time, Crosby acted as the regular host of a variety show called Kraft Music Hall performances, which featured a mixture of light comedy and popular show business acts. Crosby was keen to record the shows in advance so that his schedule would be more flexible but the radio station, NBC, refused on the grounds that the quality of wax disk recordings was much worse than live performances.

Crosby left NBC and moved to ABC Radio to host Philco Radio Time. ABC allowed the show to be pre-recorded, but the quality was so bad that audiences regularly complained and ratings slumped. Once Mackenzie heard the Magnetophon for the first time, he knew this was the solution to their problem. He hired Mullin to record and edit all 26 episodes of the second season of Philco Radio Time and ratings recovered. In addition to providing superior audio quality, magnetic tape made the editing process far easier than had been the case with the previous disk-based recording systems.

But Mullins only had about 50 rolls of German tape which were steadily degrading and getting chopped up as he erased, re-recorded and spliced them together while producing Crosby’s show. This is where 3M came in, which managed to develop a new version of the magnetic tape and a small company called Ampex, which succeeded in cloning the Magnetophon and rapidly became a world leader in the development of tape recorders.

The advent of multi-track recording

Whereas Crosby was interested in magnetic tape primarily due to the convenience of pre-recording radio shows, it was his friend and legendary guitarist Les Paul who realised the full potential of the technology. Paul had built a recording studio in his garage and Crosby lent him one of the first Ampex Model 200A tape recorders to experiment with.

But Paul didn’t just want to record live performances, he wanted to do something completely new: multi-track recording. He had tried this before using multiple acetate disks, but it was a cumbersome and expensive process. Magnetic tape enabled Paul to create the first multi-track recording machines and this new sound quickly found an audience. In fact, the version of “How High the Moon” that he recorded with his wife Mary Ford topped the US charts for 9 weeks in 1951.

Multi-track recording would unleash a radical wave of innovation in the music industry. Now each instrument could be recorded separately and sound engineers could individually manipulate the volume and equalisation for each element of the song. This flexibility expanded the creative canvass for songwriters and music producers — driving bass lines, soaring lead guitar solos and thumping bass drums could now be blended with acoustic instruments and delicate falsetto vocals.

Initially, recording machines were often restricted to 4 or 8 tracks. In fact, early Beatles releases such as Please, Please Me were recorded on 2-track machines. Producers used a trick called “bouncing” on 4-track machines, whereby multiple tracks were mixed down at set levels to a single track to create more space. For example, three guitar recordings might be mixed down to a single track before moving on to the vocals.

Overdubbing enabled musicians to do things that would be impossible in a live performance. The same vocalist could sing multiple harmonies simultaneously, for example, or the same musician could add multiple layers of instrumentation to the mix. The Beatles made extensive use of these recording techniques and Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band might be considered the apogee of the band’s technical experimentation.

It seems incredible now, but the album was created using four-track equipment. To overcome these limitations, the producer George Martin connected multiple 4-track recorders and bounced them to a single master machine to greatly expand the number of tracks available. In addition to overdubbing, the band were known for closely miking acoustic instruments and for pioneering a technique called automatic double tracking (ADT), whereby the same track is played back twice slightly asynchronously so that it has a fuller sound. John Lennon in particular was renowned for demanding that ADT would be used on almost all of his vocal performances. The album even features some of the earliest recorded examples of sampling, a technique that would become a mainstay of hip hop and electronic music decades later.

Just like Jack Mullin and Les Paul, at Utopia, we have a technology on our hands that will unleash a new wave of innovation in the music industry. We are laying the groundwork for the next generation of musical innovators by providing them with a fair and transparent revenue stream.

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