Recording The Old Fashioned Way

I will be starting a project in a few weeks where I will be engineering a Christmas CD project the old-fashioned way: live off the floor. We might do some overdubs but the approach is going to mirror the way recordings used to be done back in the old days.

My first session in Nashville was fairly typical of how recording projects were done back in the 70s: a couple of days tracking live off the floor and a couple of days mixing. The artists had to be good.

Today, the recording process can be quite clinical and time consuming. Most projects I work on often span four or five hundred hours in tracking and mixing.

The picture below is of a session at Capitol Records back in time. The tape deck is an Ampex Model 200A which was first introduced in 1947. I guess I will have to convert the studio to black and white and bring in the analog gear for the sessions.